Word: contempts
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...quite special going on here. The city is not solely an object of scorn for being clumsy and cold. The very idea of Washington is hated too. And both the idea and the fact of the city have now become so confused in the public mind that expressions of contempt for the place sound as if the city had done the complainer some personal injury: "It is impossible for me to express the depth of feelings I've seen around this country about Washington," says Columnist Richard Reeves, who worked as a national political reporter in Washington from...
...Even if witnesses were required, they were not to be found in show business-unless headlines were worth more than truth. Actor Larry Parks, a onetime Communist, exposed the machinery of informing when he begged Hollywood investigators: "Don't present me with the choice of either being in contempt of this committee and going to jail or forcing me to really crawl through the mud to be an informer. For what purpose?" The purpose, Navasky judges, was "punitive," the staging of a "degradation ceremony" as an end in itself. A witness could clear his name only by naming others...
...black federal soldiers and the townspeople, many of them ex-Confederates, lived in a certain mutual contempt. After a drunken sheepman blew out an unarmed trooper's brains in a saloon one night in 1881, the black soldiers came raging across the river into town and posted a notice: "If we do not receive justice and fair play, which we must have, some one will suffer-if not the guilty, the innocent. It has gone far enough. Justice or death." It was a moment of brave anger in the 19th century, but it passed; the white sheepman was acquitted...
...Cornell, wrote Biographer Andrew Field, "Nabokov belonged to the department of Nabokov." Just as well, considering the cheerful contempt for critical orthodoxies that resounds through these lectures. The whole historical and sociological dimension of Dickens' Bleak House, he announces, "is neither interesting nor important." He dismisses Freudian interpretations of The Metamorphosis by saying, "I am interested here in bugs, not in humbugs." As for character study in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, "the worst way to read a book is childishly to mix with the characters in it as if they were living people." Great works...
After the strikers defied a state labor relations board ruling that the walkout was illegal, a judge ordered them back to work. But it was only 14 hours before the union leaders were due in court to face possible contempt charges that the workers returned to the job at 11 p.m. Sunday night...