Word: glossed
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Most of what the South Vietnamese know about military tactics they learned from their American advisers. They learned so well that today ARVN corps commanders flit about the countryside in their personal helicopters, and some unit commanders bounce around in their own high-gloss, jet-black Jeeps. Even the lowliest enlisted man honors the American way of war: never walk when you can hitch a ride in a truck, never hitch in a truck when a Jeep is available, never ride in a Jeep when a helicopter is going your way. These profligate habits cost considerable fuel, as does...
...Consequently, the status differences among people will also be to a degree genetic. Finally, it follows that the more equally society distributes wholesome surroundings, education, and opportunities for social advancement, the more will social status depend on genetic differences, for the environmental differences will then have been minimized. I gloss over the details of the argument, so as to get on to other matters...
...which Marlowe uses to overcome denizens of the closed frontier; he doesn't give us in his film any alternative to lifestyles within California society. He wants us to take the evil of the present world as a given, and astound us with American society's mercurial ability to gloss over mercenary treachery and murder. It is a valid view of California, but a cheap apocalypse. Altman simplifies the story so much that the motives of all his characters except Marlowe are mystifying--and this new Marlowe himself is not interesting enough to hold the film together...
...Crimson is probably correct in saying that history textbooks will remember Johnson as a great leader except for the war. I have no doubt that the historians who, for instance, gloss over the Palmer Raids and the repression of the IWW in telling of Woodrow Wilson's greatness, will similarly beautify their accounts of the Johnson administration. But that is why people who are trying to understand the world, and to change it, have never had much use for the mainstream American rewriting of history. Frank Ackerman
...rest is a windy literary turn. He sketches the history of Gilles de Rais, the 15th century French child murderer, who was not a vampire. He gives a gloss of Rider Haggard's She, which is not about vampires, and a 20-page summary of Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula, which is. It is here that the single idea of Wolfs book is developed. This is the notion that the force of Stoker's novel derives from the sensual repressions of the Victorian Age. Of course he is correct. The fantasy of a tall intruder...