Word: fatuous
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...your report on South Africa, Prime Minister Botha [Dec. 3] defines apartheid as "good neighborliness," whatever that means. His comments on South Africa's blatantly racist policies sound as petty and fatuous as they really are. That bit that said that acts such as the immorality act had "existed all these years to protect colored and black women from being exploited by ruthless white men" generated cynical laughter...
...Wilson, Bayard Rustin, Joseph W. Bishop and Podhoretz's wife Midge Decter. With sharp logic and biting wit, they drew considerable blood as they assailed radicalism on all fronts: its elitism, coercive utopianism, contempt for the common American, penchant for Government intervention, tolerance of Communist totalitarianism and its fatuous call for revolution. Intellectually at any rate, they soon had their adversaries on the run; many of the most voluble leftists of the period have faded from the polemical scene: Noam Chomsky, Daniel and Philip Berrigan, Staughton Lynd, Jerry Rubin, Andrew Kopkind ("Morality, like politics, starts at the barrel...
Aside from this, however, Sagan retreats into the misty land of speculation--on the future, on the possibility of extraterrestrial life, on the possibility of intergalactic communication. For example, he draws a hyperbolic and fatuous parallel between the Big Bang theory of the birth of the universe, and the human birth experience. He proposes a seemingly infinite number of theories in these chapters and substantiates each less well than its predecessor, abandoning totally the close scrutiny he has just advocated so strongly...
...lifeguards live, how dams work, the philosophy and history of shopping malls. She is always honest in her examinations of a setting or person. She dams through accuracy, not forceful moral argument. In "Bureaucrats," for example, she perfectly captures officials' self-importance and insularity. Placing contradictory statistics after bureaucrats' fatuous proclamations, she quietly pillories them. But she can nevertheless convey their own sense of misguided sincerity...
Didion as a rule uses her self-dramatizations with an artist's instinctive discretion. She is an alert and subtle observer, with a mordant intelligence and a sense of humor with touches of Evelyn Waugh in it. She offers a lethal description of fatuous Hollywood political chatter. " 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,' some one said to me at dinner not long ago, and before we had finished our fraises des bois, he had advised me as well that 'no man is an island.' " The White Album is full...