Word: flaccidity
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When our image was that of "the Ugly American," we felt safe and strong. Now we are known as and have proved we are the "Flaccid Americans." Only God can help the country now, after the Panama tragedy...
...dawned rather crunchingly on me last week that, after eight soft months on the Harvard Nieman dole, I too am going to be shipped out soon--back into that nervous, fumbling brigade they call "the press corps." Shipped out a bit more flaccid than I'd like to admit. A bit more worried about my role; confused about my credentials as a critic of the American scheme...
...Times has not had to worry much about its home-town competition. The Hearst Corp., five months ago, hired ex-Washington Star Editor Jim Bellows to revive its long flaccid Herald-Examiner (circ. 331,000). Bellows has softened the paper's eye-straining makeup, imported hot-blooded young writers and editors from the East, hired David Frost's girlfriend, Caroline Gushing, to write gossip items, is about to launch a graphically dramatic Sunday photo magazine, and is even thinking about changing the paper's name back to the simpler Examiner. But the retooled daily...
...that anyone else under John Clark's flaccid direction is giving her much acting competition. Robert LuPone's Dauphin is such a prancing cipher that one fears the crown that Joan se cures for him at Rheims Cathedral will melt his head. Paul Sparer, as the Inquisitor, gives a saturnine gravity to the renowned and convoluted speech on heresy, but his plea for justice with mercy is a trifle smarmy. Only Philip Bosco as the English Earl of Warwick conveys nobility in voice and bearing...
...rather successfully?with luring kids to class with free hamburgers, Frisbees, T shirts and yo-yos donated by local businessmen. After a decade of stormy debate, there is no consensus about how schools can right the wrongs. Conservative back to basics" forces rail that '60s innovations have left schools flaccid. They demand a return to a three-Rs curriculum and call for "minimal competency" testing, to make sure that high school students are not granted diplomas until they can read and write at some rudimentary level. More progressive forces disagree with this approach. "I'm all through with mandating, with...