Word: cynic
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...tune, as peaceful and completed as the camp-meeting songs his grandmother had sung. The tune recurs throughout the sonata, and always, after you've heard the whole piece once, with the same double resonance--which Ives said was single, "transcendent and sentimental enough for the enthusiast or the cynic, respectively." It was more possible in music than in politics to confidently identify backward and forward glances, "digging in real life" with selling insurance, radicalism with patriotism, a Concord hymn tune with Beethoven's Fifth Symphony...
Americans have always had mixed feelings about their press. In folklore, the reporter is Superman's alter ego, but he is also the Front Page cynic who would trade in his grandmother for a scoop. By way of a more elevated example, almost everybody (at least among journalists) remembers Jefferson's famous remark that if he had to choose between a government without newspapers and newspapers without a government, he would pick the latter. But few recall that Jefferson also wrote on another occasion: "Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper...
Maybe it's too corny for the cosmopolitan frame of mind, or the confirmed cynic who demands perfection from himself, but Nickel Mountain leaves you feeling that there is an order to life. At the end of the book an old couple watch their son's coffin winched out of a grave. The woman shouts "I believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ." The man yells, "Shut up." In the solemn eyes of Henry Soames, where everything has some value, and you "don't shoot at everything that moves on the theory it might be a rattler," even this scene...
...cast is splendid to a man, but perhaps special praise should be meted out to Joseph Maher as a backbiting, working-class cynic, to John Wardwell as a much put-upon boss who reads his balance sheet of life in red ink, to Reid Shelton as the stoic foreman once jailed for embezzlement, and to Kevin O'Connor as a sweetly compassionate, but unsentimentalized, stuttering imbecile...
Michael Landon--eternally, Little Joe Cart-wright from "Bonanza"--wrote and directed the first episode "Love Came Laughing." Reunited for the leads were Bonnie Bedelia and Michael Brandon, the newlyweds of "Lovers and Other Strangers." Brandon plays an uncommitted and unemployed young cynic, who, tied to his hypochondriac mother, is slipping into an easy, sleazy barroom existence until Bedelia moves in alone on the first floor of his apartment building. She is lovely and she is willing, but, although not dying, she is five months pregnant by an old boyfriend. For a young love's trial by fire, this...