Word: cynic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Alongside Chomsky's apocalyptic posture-historian as moralist and trac-tarian-Bloodworth has the slouch of a cynic. He is the professional journalist, selecting the amusing or exotic tidbit for the reader's jaded palate. He has seen too much to be shocked by anything or to believe in anything. He survives by his reflex for flippancy. Yet, by a curious paradox, Bloodworth's book eventually seems wiser and even more serious than Chomsky...
...FACT, at times one almost felt her too good for the material, Brel-at least the Brel who filters through the English translations-is generally heralded as "a poet," "a poet and a philosopher," "an ironies of cynical maturity," and "a man low on hope but high on love" (to quote the bedazzled Boston press). Brel, they would have us believe, is a realistic romantic and a tempered cynic. But what comes through his songs-at least those chosen for this show-is not so much romantic as sentimental, the songs of a man less a cynic, more a weak...
...come back to us, Robert A. Heinlein, amateur astronomer, former naval person, practical engineer, supreme cynic, ideological flibbertigibbet, magnificent story-teller. It will be too much to take if the bad madness of the nation has ruined...
...Hawthorne's allegorical short story, Young Goodman Brown, the ingenuous Puritan wanders into the forest one dark night and catches all his friends, neighbors and saintly village elders in mortal sin-in this case devil worship. It might have been just a dream, but it made a lifelong cynic of young Brown. Much the same thing happened not long ago to a young reporter named Charley Thompson, who wandered into Jacksonville. Fla. The sin was not devil worship but pollution, a suitable modern equivalent. And it was no dream...
...patrol's commanding officer (Denholm Elliott) is a well-bred British fumbler who keeps getting his men bushwhacked on an island in the South Pacific. The cynic-in-residence is a cool-eyed cockney medic (Michael Caine), who alternates between bandaging the wounded and needling his commander. A reluctant Japanese-language specialist seconded from the American Navy (Cliff Robertson) is straight out of The Bridge on the River Kwai; he becomes the company pragmatist who is determined only to save his own neck. The rest of the motley crew consists of bellyaching foot soldiers (Ian Bannen, Ronald Fraser, Lance...