Word: arnolds
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...1880s the british poet and culture critic Matthew Arnold paid two visits to the U.S. to observe the native customs. Eventually he set down his impressions in a book, Civilization in the United States. On the whole, he didn't think there was much. For one thing, he was troubled by the way Americans appeared to lack any capacity for reverence toward superior men. "If there be a discipline in which the Americans are wanting," he pronounced, "it is the discipline of awe and respect." And in that connection, one institution of American life struck him as an especially...
...Arnold didn't mention any funnyman in particular. He didn't have to. In an essay six years earlier, he had already attacked by name the most famous American funnyman of all, Mark Twain. His humor, Arnold sniffed, was "so attractive to the Philistine." It would be truer to say it was attractive to anyone who valued plain speaking and the kind of deadly wit that could cut through the cant and hypocrisy surrounding any topic, no matter how sensitive: war, sex, religion, even race. Twain was righteous without being pious, angry for all the right reasons and funny...
...same, Twain was stung by Arnold's words and prepared a reply that he never published. That's a shame, because it includes the single best one-line defense not just of himself but also of how a democratic society works in the first place. "A discriminating irreverence," he wrote, "is the creator and protector of human liberty." This would be the polite way of saying "Go stuff your...
...Arnold Schwarzenegger, California governor, breaking party ranks to oppose Bush's plan...
...offshore drilling I find more than a little surprising," says Mark Kraus, vice president of the Everglades Foundation, "especially when the experts say it would take at least 10 years before it had any effect on gas prices." Crist supporters cringed on Thursday when California governor and Crist pal Arnold Schwarzenegger - during his keynote speech at Crist's eco-summit - himself called offshore drilling a phony fix to the oil-price crisis. But Crist argues that industry experts he's talked to posit that increasing U.S. crude output could lower gas prices "much more rapidly" than the decade or more...