Word: devilment
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...THERE you have it: Riggs parrots stinging lines for fast money and vast attention, and makes himself a victim of his own villainous cause. He played darling devil's dare to the Women's Cause, and set them up as its defenders. It's like the sneaky fox who sets Mama lion raging in her lair. The anti-hero teases the hero into vengeance. And so Billy Jean King, like any American hero, could do what she had to do with justice on her side...
...doubt that Plarr at last experiences himself. His pure disgust at the physical side of life matches (and is perhaps intended to represent) the ancient Gnostic heresy that held Christ never to have been made flesh, and regarded the fleshly world as simply a dirty trick played by the devil...
EVIL RETURNS. The devil, it can be reliably reported, is alive and well. He no longer appears in his ancient theological raiment; he is more subtly lodged in the human personality-a seventh circle of the psyche-where he is currently known as the instinct of aggression. Such is the description he has been given by ethologists like Konrad Lorenz and Robert Ardrey, who argue that fundamental drives are the basis of human behavior. In the '60s, it was commonly supposed that the devil could be banished by improving human institutions, but he seems scarcely daunted by such superficial...
Poor Colonel Matucci has the devil's own time getting to the bottom of all this. All of his informants are voluble expositors from the "How is your father, the Archduke?" school of dialogue. Matucci's tiniest queries elicit encyclopedic replies. Matucci is also afflicted with an odd syntactic ataxia that makes his English sound like an American's idea of Italian. Thus handicapped, Matucci loses his struggles with metaphors ("A new conviction was crystallizing out of the murky fluid of my own thoughts...
...women wear dresses that fall below the knee. Members eschew all nonmarital sex, hold regular jobs, tend to live close to one another as if in some kind of lay monastery. But critics say they are insufferably elitist, consider themselves more enlightened than other Christians, and generally see the devil at work in anyone who disagrees with them. Worse, to some parents, is that they often seem to stress fellowship ties over those of family...