Word: braden
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...querulous. Two of them, Fitzpatrick (Emery Battis) and Marshall (John Cazale), verbally dominate the play, like stinging tarantulas. On a certain level, Storey has drawn a scathing portrait of the welfare state prole. But Storey never withdraws his compassion from any of these men. When the foreman, Kay (John Braden), is exposed as an ex-convict, and another workman is mocked because his wife deserted him for his impotence, Storey fills each man's eyes with a scalding, terrible hurt. The wedding never takes place; the tent has been erected in vain...
...rolling up of sleeves in the Gardner spirit will do for Braden. What Gardner takes to be the problems−racism, poverty amid affluence, and so on−Braden takes to be simply the symptoms of a sick society. Like Gardner, he wants to believe that America can be saved from its apocalypse, and all his interviews, all his quick-tour surveys are really devoted to looking into ways and means...
Will the young supply the spark for regeneration? Alas, the young, Braden fears, may be too obsessed with lifestyle and too hedonistic−just a new kind of market for technology to manipulate. "Consumers of enjoyment," to quote Lasch...
Will the blacks be the saving remnant? Can they join white America, in James Baldwin's words, to "achieve our country, and change the history of the world?" With cautious romanticism, Braden is half tempted to think so, because, like Baldwin, but perhaps incorrectly, he assumes that the black has not been conned by the myths of white America−above all, by the "ideology of maximum production and maximum consumption." At any rate, Braden, an amateur theologian (The Private Sea), concludes that nothing short of a religious conversion can save America. Technology is beyond reversal−"that which...
...Braden ends up, like John Gardner, with unfashionable expressions of hope, quoting the German theologian Jiirgen Moltmann's The Theology of Hope. If the present looks grim, well, maybe−just maybe−there's the future. He settles for the progressive slogan, "Say no to the given and yes to the new." He gambles, as a humanist, that if runaway technology can be slowed down, it will somehow come out evolution rather than revolution...