Word: canting
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Such is Cimino's fresh perspective that The Deer Hunter should be an equally disorienting experience for hawks and doves. This is the first movie about Viet Nam to free itself from all political cant. It contains no antiwar characters at all; its prowar characters are apolitical foot soldiers, not fire-breathing gook killers. The film is as far removed from Coming Home as it is from The Green Berets. Cimino has attempted to embrace all the tragic contradictions of the U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia...
...Jones' cultish socialism, the spiritual and political were joined. In their terrific surrender, cultists reduce a multiform, contradictory world to cant formulas, and thus they become as dangerous as anyone whose head resounds with certainties...
...DOES have problems. Cant terms and phrases blemish the work, including, foremost, "nurture" in all possible tenses and manifestations. "Parent" is used repeatedly as a transitive verb, a questionable usage more startling than necessary. Quotations, essential to carrying the book outside the limited experience of ten women, sometimes obtrude, making the prose lurch like some balky pack-animal. And the eighth chapter, a pseudo-Marxist critique of American society, seems incongruous and overextends the credibility of the authors...
...almost exclusively coopted it. But hip-booted, lock-'em-up demagoguery has hardly stemmed a crime wave that keeps two out of every five citizens behind locked doors after dark. America, surfeited with crime, looks for a real solution. Charles Silberman's Criminal Violence, Crimal Justice strips away the cant, provides the hard facts, and finally makes it possible to think about, instead of react to, the problem of crime...
...this quality that gives Camus a solar power in times of cant and moral squalor. Unlike his fellow anti-colonialists, Camus was never willing to issue a license to kill. Of rebel atrocities he writes, "The truth, alas, is that part of French opinion vaguely holds that the Arabs have in a way earned the right to slaughter and mutilate, while another part is willing to justify in a way all excesses. To justify himself, each relies on the other's crime. But that is a casuistry of blood, and it strikes me that an intellectual cannot become involved...