Word: cliches
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...shadow crossed the Emperor's demented brain. In this threadbare, novelistic pastiche, Vincent Sheean treats Seneca far worse. Though the historical Seneca was second only to Cicero as an exponent of Stoicism, Sheean's Seneca has only windy self-pity and a maundering facility with cosmic clichés ("In my opinion the wickedest and unworthiest of men are generally the most rewarded"). He shows little understanding of his venomous pupil, perhaps because Sheean's Nero is not a character at all but a dim amal gam of perfumes, painted lips and libido. In all, Sheean...
Were the young listening? Probably not. The last word may belong to the student speaker at Yale who some time ago summed up the situation with a cliché of his own: "We are the leaders of tomorrow-how does that grab...
...Artist Robert Rauschenberg, but Schwitters would have thoroughly approved. Whether he would have been altogether at home with current pop art excesses is another question. Pop art seems to cock a mocking eye at the present affluent society by enshrining such shibboleths as soup cans and commercial-art clichés. Schwitters' goal was more angry. "One can shout out through refuse," he once wrote. "Merz was like an image of the revolution within me, not as it was, but as it should have been." But he was ahead of pop art in his imaginative use of materials...
...attended the teach-in at the University of Michigan [May 14] with more than passing interest. I was, however, dismayed to hear clichés and slogans instead of the searching discussions I had expected. During the polemics, the armband wearers bustled about with ludicrous selfimportance, contributing only rudeness and epithets to the "search for alternatives." There appeared to be no cognizance of the complexity or even the reality of the situation in Viet Nam. The entire problem seemed to boil down to being for or against the burning of Vietnamese children. During one of the intermissions, however, my dismay...
This U.S. concern springs from various causes. It is not merely that, as the cliché has it, "Americans want to be loved"; deeply accustomed at home to government by consent, the U.S. cannot quite visualize international leadership without consent. During the Age of Reason, when humanity at large was deemed capable of holding a collective view, the Declaration of Independence pledged a "decent respect to the opinions of mankind." At the time, this meant not merely listening but telling-giving the world a forthright, stirring statement of the American purpose...