Word: frightener
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...Clean for Gene" syndrome-McCarthy's young legions getting themselves barbered and laundered lest too countercultural an appearance frighten off the more conventional citizenry. This year some of George McGovern's youthful volunteers are practicing the same Dale Carnegie tactics. Some of those who are not are getting themselves set straight. In Wisconsin, for example, McGovern headquarters mailed out instructions to some 70 state schools and universities. "Guys who canvass," said the memo, "should try to look halfway decent. Every freak must have at least a pair of slacks and a shirt. Similar for chicks. We have...
...keyhole. The pad is neoclassic Allen. The windows have been widened, the duplex thoroughly decorated ("It looks," says Cavett, "like the set for the George Arliss movie, The Man Who Played God"). On the terrace, the meticulously arranged Japanese garden features live plants and coiled-up rubber snakes to frighten away the pigeons. One afternoon, a rubber snake fell from the terrace and landed on a lady below. She sued, of course...
...nabbed and isolated the little men first. When he won a first-degree murder conviction against one of the gunmen, he used it as a weapon to frighten others into talking. Faced with the possibility of the electric chair, three of the conspirators confessed, implicating officials higher up the union ladder. It was Huddleston's own daughter, Annette Gilly, a stooped and sad-faced housewife, who fingered him in the killing. In exchange she received a deal for a life sentence instead of death for her role as an accomplice. Huddleston was prompted to confess for the same self...
...Hollywood designer, had to have a car all his own, unique, so he stripped a Chrysler down to its frame and hand-built his own shiny aluminum body held together by crude rivets; the car is pointed at the ends like a silver Buck Rogers rocket ship -enough to frighten drivers off the road on Santa Monica Boulevard. North Hollywood's Nudie the Tailor glorified his Pontiac Bonneville with Western regalia. The religious here do not settle for plastic Jesuses on the dash, they erect whole creches and biblical scenes next to the Kleenex boxes in their back windows...
...should not be difficult to accept that it is the primitive in us that goes to meet the primitive in Flannery O'Conner, or that the setting for this atavism is our own South. What should frighten us is that her tribal warfare scenarios find their metaphors in the passion play of Mary and Jesus. Flannery O'Conner's most telling achievement is her derision of the hemophilia of our self-images. She points out that if violence kills, it also transfigures...