Word: crackpotisms
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...reactionary advocate of population control, Petrie was also the nettlesome gadfly editor of a scholarly monthly journal. At the time of his murder, he was composing a treatise on the failure of the American experiment. The reader is compelled to ask if the megalomaniacal Petrie was 1) a mere crackpot, 2) a latter-day Henry Adams or 3) a pernicious William F. Buckley minus the charm. The novel is slowly unraveled by three highly inflamed, profoundly disturbed minds. Each version of the events needs the other two to make literary and psychological sense...
...parents did, inadvertently, help me find my own solution to the Christmas dilemma one year when I was about 14. Their names used to turn up on every crackpot mailing list in the country, and consequently we would get a constant barrage of all sorts of propaganda. One of our most frequent correspondents was a woman named Madalyn Murray O'Hair, the self-appointed apostle of American atheists. The way she handled Christmas was not to fight it, but to join it. Christmas, she announced in a brochure that appeared in our mailbox one day in early December...
...defeat the Democratic upstart. Loeb's Manchester Union Leader frequently assailed Durkin as a carpetbagger* from Massachusetts (he moved to New Hampshire eight years ago). Durkin was also tagged as a tool of labor unions and an advocate of big spending and big Government. Loeb even printed unsigned crackpot hate letters-purportedly from Durkin supporters-attacking Wyman...
...more at work here than sheer greed. The Bicentennial Commission's decision to split the festivities between a number of cities was of course a politic one--maximize the number of places where people can spend money, spread the wealth, and make everyone happy except maybe a few crackpot citizens who don't want hordes of tourists tramping over their community). But it was also an appropriate decision because it recognized the need to bring into all this Bicentennialia as many people as possible. If you don't bring them in, they feel left out. It's like not being...
Mishima's samurai patriotism doubtless had a certain crackpot authenticity. He and his small private army were allowed to train with Japan's self-defense force. At the end, he was fanatically Japanese, yet he also cared deeply about foreign opinion. He has been lucky in his posthumous biographers in the West. The first, English Journalist Henry Scott-Stokes, last year published a sensitive and sympathetic analysis (The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima) that appreciated Mishima's accomplishments while explaining them in terms of his lurid narcissism...