Word: bombastics
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...Mailer's new journalistic endeavors inspires a touch of cynicism, for his style often works like an elastic bag into which he can pour anything from political conventions to traffic congestion and come up with instant apocalyptic meditations. His early essays in the middle fifties were pure mental bombast; the weight of reflection far exceeded the weight of its object so that it hardly mattered what he was talking about. Starting with the '64 Republican Convention and culminating with Armies of the Night. he had found the kind of material to which his species of unconventional thinking and his concepts...
Neil MacNeil observed Dirksen's career for 19 years-the last twelve as chief congressional correspondent for TIME. He is best when narrating the intricate workings of Congress, fondly chronicling the stratagems of cloture and bombast. His portrait is judicious and frequently admiring. Only occasionally, though, does he step back and render judgment: "Using a rhetorical ready-mix of melancholy and country humor, Dirksen mouthed the platitudes of an earlier America as though they were beatitudes, and he sensed himself as the appointed guardian of those values...
Heavy Breathing. But Lean has opted for bombast rather than character development, scope instead of dramatic tension. The time is 1916, and Britain's thin red line of empire is being besieged on two sides by the Boches and the Irish Republican Army. Rosy is a willful, discontented lass who scorns the bumptious town boys and chooses by default the widowed, middle-aged teacher. Shaughnessy warns her: "I only taught you about Byron and Beethoven and Captain Blood. I'm not one of them fellows meself." They marry anyway, and her wedding night is your standard virgin...
...PERFUNCTORY bid for the Catholic vote, Richard Nixon stopped off at the Vatican on his European tour and edified the Pope with the moralistic bombast appropriate to a man who models himself after Woodrow Wilson. Two days later the Lrish would throw rotten eggs at him. Paul VI, though, simply communicated to the President a brief but vigorous plea for peace. Nixon claimed to share the Pope's concern for peace and then generously requited from his Inaugural Address those hackneyed lines on "the need for strength in an era of negotiation...
...great leader, Chairman Mao, has stated, 'We too should produce man-made satellites.' We are happy to announce that this great call by Chairman Mao has come true." With that characteristic bombast, the New China News Agency last week announced an important technological achievement: the successful lofting of a 381-lb. satellite into earth orbit...