Word: benignity
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Containing only the lightest and most digest-able materials, "Sitting Pretty" is easy to enjoy in a light mood. Often in the past the movies have given suburbia benign pokes in ribs, and this one, a kind of combination of "Claudia" and "Blondie" is among the best of the genre. As usual nothing much happens; a number of people think something, especially cuckoldry, is happening; but the audience, smugly aware that everything's just fine, keeps its happiness and its equanimity...
...perfectibility. This perfectibility is being achieved through technology, science, politics, social reform, education. Man is essentially good, says 20th Century liberalism, because he is rational, and his rationality is (if the speaker happens to be a liberal Protestant) divine, or (if he happens to be religiously unattached) at least benign. Thus the reason-defying paradoxes of Christian faith are happily bypassed...
After bestowing this benign "Well done," Cripps wagged a grandfatherly finger. Even if British production reaches his target-140% of the prewar level-the trading deficit with the U.S. will be running at about $1 billion a year. Without Marshall Plan aid, he warned, Britain's dollars and expendable gold reserve will be exhausted by midsummer. Then Britain will "be driven back upon a policy of immediate self-preservation." Cripps meant that, without further U.S. aid, Britain would have to cut off U.S. food, raw material and machinery imports, fall back on barter pacts with other countries...
...responsible for this deal is the Adventists' plump, benign Carlyle B Haynes of Washington, B.C., who has made similar bargains with twelve other international unions during the past two years. Says he: "We believe that we ought not to be tied up in any organization which by a majority vote can bind us to a course of action contrary to our religious convictions...
...frustration a power maniac like Jinnah could suddenly leap out of the shadows and, screaming wildly, lead hundreds of thousands over the chasm's edge. . . . We have made our mistakes, but history will record that a great portion of the guilt lies on that "admirable" power now so "benign in her twilight...