Word: brechtian
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...intellectual mercenary. He will retract theories, integrity and self-respect so long as he is paid off with his life. Knowledge is an appetite for him and not an unstained banner of loyalty to scientific inquiry or a mandate to kill the belief in God. He is the typical Brechtian hero-heel, a seemingly intrepid liberator of mankind who is cringingly adept at saving his own skin, a born false Messiah. Brecht rather ingenuously indicts Galileo for not ushering in a sempiternal age of reason and for recanting before the agents of the Inquisition. Actually, Western man adopted an unquestioning...
Dylan, apparently reacting against his total emotional involvement in the stifling, up-to-date agonies of Blonde on Blonde, took care to place his new songs in another, strange realm. This process is akin to the Brechtian notion of "defamiliarization"--making the action subject to rational scrutiny, unclouded by emotion, because it is viewed from a distance. And since this technique requires activation by a Message, Dylan was able to infuse John Wesley Harding with a spiritual, almost religious tone...
...conceived by the black African mind. The huge breadbox mouth flaps open to emit the platitudes of white domination, the solace of the white man's religion, the equity of the white man's law. The cast play the colonizers of Angola and the colonized interchangeably, singing Brechtian ditties that sardonically mock the oppressors and vivify the laments of the oppressed...
...also happened to be the author of a source book on Tartar history. Incredibly, Mrs. Ginzburg was arrested and denounced as a Trotskyite and counter-revolutionary because she had failed to write a review for her publication denouncing Elvov's Tartar book. In short, the masters of a Brechtian netherworld of logical non-reason accused her of not doing something she had not done-and of course she could not deny not doing...
Violence for Peace. It is not so much what Bird says but who he is when he says it. To polish his metallic-voiced, dandruff-flecked,chipmunk-cheeked impersonation of Harold Wilson, he spends hours studying the Prime Minister's "Brechtian performances" on TV, which he likens to "a political guerrilla fight: always backing off, always in retreat, but always seeming to attack...