Word: cretinism
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...give hate too much of a strange literary prestige. Black sun. White whale. Whatever. The reason the subject is hard to discuss is that hate is simultaneously a mystery and a moron. It seems either too profound to understand or too shallow and stupid to bear much analysis -- a cretin with a club, violent, repulsive, irrational, a black intoxication, an accomplice of death...
...linked, it is World War I. The appalling chaos, the industrialization of death, the grinding of a whole generation into the mud of France by advanced technology -- these spelled an end to positivist fantasies of human progress. And after the carnage of the trenches, who but a cretin or a fascist could echo the futurists' rhetoric about war as the hygiene of civilization? To many artists it must have seemed that picking up the pieces had priority over more fragmentation...
...then Reagan has always been attended by an aura of amiable averageness. The producer Alfred de Liagre said that Reagan on film "always had the manner of an earnest gas-station attendant." Liberal writers have dismissed him as ideologue, cretin and airhead, or worse. They have thought of Chauncey Gardiner, the transcendentally brainless seer in Jerzy Kosinski's novel Being There. Gardiner, in the eloquence of his idiocy, becomes a national oracle. "How humiliating," the columnist Nicholas von Hoffman wrote of Reagan in 1982, "to think of this unlettered, self-assured bumpkin being our President...
...hard to imagine Ford's being convincing as a creep or a cretin or even an ordinary villain, and his career has followed the dutiful, almost square path one would expect from the characters he projects. When he saw that he was not receiving the kinds of parts he wanted back in the '60s, he did what the forthright, somewhat self-righteous John Book would have done. Rather than fritter away his talent as a bit actor on TV car-chase shows, he all but dropped out for seven years, turning down 90% of the jobs he was offered. With...
...country to take over the White House should some disaster or assassin strike. That piety is a useful standard to keep before the eyes of the convention, and in a civics-lesson way, it should be true. But it is mostly nonsense. No presidential nominee wants a cretin or arsonist on his ticket, but otherwise the running mate is chosen, not for sterling presidential qualities, but because he (she) will help ensure victory in November. The exercise is often called ticket balancing. If nominees in elections past have chosen running mates for geographical balance, or ethnic balance, or religious balance...