Word: conly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Con artists are familiar figures in American literature, though they are usually directed through culture's back door. Their calling card was written by a 19th century popular comic character named Simon Suggs: "It is good to be shifty in a new country." Gary Lindberg's elaborate study The Confidence Man in American Literature, uses Suggs and his cronies as models to examine the national character. The task requires the assistance of that old critical handyman, ambivalence...
...news that public condemnation of the con man is mixed with private admiration for his sting. More than 50 years ago, V.L. Parrington's Main Currents in American Thought noted that the sharpster appealed to the hidden desires of an otherwise hardworking, pious people. Lindberg considers the ambivalent attitude to be not hypocrisy but rather a theoretical expression of American genius. A con man may impoverish widows and orphans, but he cannot do so without first creating confidence. And confidence, says the author, who is a professor of English at the University of New Hampshire, is what America...
James M. Hardy, a speaker, charged the United States with supporting "in-stitutionalized terrorism" in Latin America and said that except for "Nicaragua and Panama, Central America has become one huge con-centration camp...
...summer of lobbying were understandably upsetting. The apparent failure of the supply-side doctrine to impact on pressing economic problems turned Stockman's ideological purity over upon itself, leaving instead a stark naivete. The wheeler-dealer all of a sudden became sensitive to the machinations of budget politics, the con jobs he had to perform to win votes, as well as the inevitable battles among the members of the cabinet. Stockman lost once to Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger '38, over the matter of defense cuts, and for a second time (after the Atlantic's article went to press...
...Jesse James (1939) and The Grapes of Wrath (1940), Fonda is virtually cornered into renegade political activism; a corrupt System flays him, but under the vulnerable Midwestern skin is a species of American hero. In his best comedy, The Lady Eve (1941), Fonda is the perfect patsy for a con woman, Barbara Stanwyck?so perfect that she falls in love with the sap. Watching Fonda writhe under Stanwyck's bogus endearments remains one of the high delights of screwball farce...