Word: comstockian
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Reno and Simon have been helped in their Comstockian crusade by a degenerate gene pool and a population unwilling to accept responsibility. A few young children set fires; a few older children decide to lie down in the road for kicks. Their parents, instead of blaming either their own defective child-rearing, or their children's congenital dunderheadedness decide to blame Beavis and Butt-head and Disney...
...educated youth, fearing the sensationalism that dogs his step, has chosen to be silent. This is no occasion for creating precedent. Indeed, one may believe that undergraduate drinking is Epicurean rather than vicious, that the attitude toward delinquencies of Mr. Duffus' "other sort" are reasoned if not Comstockian. But as far as the fact goes, the optimistic critics must be reminded that three all important factors in the upholding of the old code were conscientious acceptance of conventional morality, religious scruple, and fear rising out of ignorance. And today--those bulwarks have lost their strength...
...chief portrait. He suppressed Jurgen, famed allegory by James Branch Cabell. He did quite well until 1919 when he inadvertently attacked Harper & Bros. for publishing the dull biography of a prostitute. He obtained a conviction, but Harpers won their appeal in New York's highest court, which weakened Comstockian Section 1141 by holding that questionable art or literature is guiltless unless it "tends to excite lustful or lecherous desire." Tendencies are such vague things that Mr. Sumner's record fell off from 150 convictions...
...Viennese method of dealing with immoral publications differs somewhat from the Comstockian* method. Last week, one Otto Rostock walked into the office of Herr Hugo Bettaur, publisher of a "villainously immoral magazine." He fired directly at the publisher, who fell, wounded. Rostock announced to the police that he wished to "arouse the moral sentiment of Vienna...
There is much serious verse that is good, an editorial that smacks of Lampy's halcyon days and a free translation into Chinese English of the Jimmian equivalent of "two threes" as "one couple in the royal bath for three exalted minutes"--which is not altogether Comstockian. Mr. Choate's and Mr. Behn's drawings are, as ever, exceptionally good, and there is a mildly amusing article on the annoying miscellany of "drives," as well as a Biblical distortion that is funny in spots. On the whole the number is a pleasant one, calculated to "tickle the great American public...
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