Word: charlatan
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...that for a minute. A student group at Harvard has sponsored a speaker who called for the extermination of gay people. This is made no less chilling by the fact that Cameron is a crackpot, thrown out of professional organizations by psychologists and sociologists. Even if he is a charlatan, where were the sponsors of the event? Did they stand up and dissociate themselves from his statements? Does the Conservative Club believe that killing gay people is something worth; talking about? The Conservative Club owes gay people and the entire Harvard-Radcliffe community an apology...
Part of the secret of his success is that his eclecticism creates surface expectations of major art (complexity, depth, psychic intensity and so on) without discharging them in explicit meanings. He wittily exploits the affinity between artist and charlatan. A symbolist with roller skates, he moves very quickly across a vast terrain of appropriated motifs, and the results are usually banal. Even in today's morass of worthless "personal" imagery, it would be hard to find a sillier painting than one in the Castelli show of a green whirlpool a la Poe with a man and his separated genitals disappearing...
...opening scene shows a bizarre gathering, what looks like a mixture of a seance and a suffragette fund-raiser at a musty Boston club. Featured performers are a "Dr." Tarrant, full-time charlatan, faith-healer, and medium. The message is provided by his charming, red-haired daughter Verena (Madeleine Potter) who, assisted by her father's attendant spirits, delivers a heart-wrenching address on behalf of oppressed women. The camera alternates between a prim-looking, middle-aged woman listening to Verena's rhetoric in mystic rapture, tears in her eyes: and a handsome young man, listening with appreciation that looks...
...children come into the world, fresh, ignorant of what has preceded them and what is expected of them, keen to observe, and averse to acting as they are told. To create a uniform world, one would have to devise a way of making acquired characteristics inheritable: something that the charlatan biologist. Trofin Lysenko, promised Stalin, who desperately desired such power...
MAKE NO MISTAKE--Falwell is a charlatan, and a dangerous one. His illiberal views on gay rights, school prayer, and national defense would, if enacted into law, imperil civil rights and world peace. But the preacher's enormous popularity is no mere media trick. He speaks to deep-seated feelings of confusion and discontent among the American people. Like 1930s rightist radio clergyman Father Charles Coughlin, Falwell provides Americans beset by hard times an answer to their problems: Return to tradition and authority. And he does so in terms that resonate deep within our collective imagination--God and Country...