Word: berte
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Career Pap. Bert Flax is a sunny, shallow, sincere young man who begins his writing career as a precocious student in a Bronx parochial school, submitting smug little essays to the Catholic press-most notably the Tiny Messenger and Catholic Woman. His subjects run to problems like dirty movies and where the angels go in the wintertime; his most masterly creation is Father Danny, "a lean, clear-eyed man, with a spring in his step and a great fund of natural humility." Bert is so good at this kind of pap, in fact, that he decides to make a career...
What trips Bert up is his decision to live in the suburbs with his wife and five children. In the wealthy town of Bloodbury, Bert is appalled by the comfortable banality of the faith practiced at St. Jude's-a church that strikes him as a mere "antiseptic comfort station." The wheyfaced priests at St. Jude's, "moving knowingly from the book to the cruets," seem to be "a million light years" away from Father Danny. Even Bert's wife fails him; her romantic notion of her husband is that he is "her serene man of faith...
Tight Smiles. Hemmed in by five sniffling children who always seem to be "passing the family cold sloppily among them" and a mother-in-law "with a voice like a trench mortar," Bert feels his boredom growing "wantonly, insanely; every week it flung another wet arm around him." As boredom grows, faith recedes, and guilt closes in on Bert like a summer fog. He sits before his typewriter starting sentences he never finishes ("Where pagans go wrong is that . . ."; "Christmas, as Chesterton once put it . . ."). The rejection slips pile up. Whenever Bert tries to explain his trial of faith...
...respected politician whose denial of this groin-type tactic seems worthy of belief. But there is no question that Nunn is using the civil rights issue for all it is worth, and that may be plenty in border state Kentucky. He was handed a readymade platform when Governor Bert Combs issued an executive order last June banning discrimination in all business establishments licensed by the state. Combs is not allowed to succeed himself, and Breathitt is his hand-picked Democratic candidate. Nunn has tirelessly hit at Breathitt through Combs...
...least 50 people (with 10 sq. ft. per person); thus it does not apply to home shelters. It allocates $175 million to aid state and local governments, schools, hospitals and other nonprofit institutions to build shelters, earmarks another $15.6 million to construct shelters in federal buildings. Said Hèbert about his pro-shelter switch: "I do not know whether it will save a single life, but I am not going to play God and make a determination upon the future life or death of any American...