Word: hokum
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...future excavators can pore over the bones of War and Remembrance and see (in the fall chapters, at least) the definitive example of a once flourishing breed: a lumbering but amiable dinosaur, equal parts history and hokum, spectacle and soap opera. The historical narrative plays best, as the series provides a lucid account of the key battles and decisions on which the war turned. It also dramatizes, with chilling bluntness, the Nazi atrocities at Auschwitz, as well as the slaughter of Jews at Babi Yar. Few lines on network TV are as shocking as the remark of a Nazi officer...
...SILLIER SIDE of psychiatry shone through the diplomatic haze last Friday, when the State Department released an Air Force psychiatrist's report on a would-be Soviet defector. In several thousand equivocal words, a scientific charlatan shrouded hokum, pure and simple, in the mantle of medicine...
...course, the picture is pure hokum, and everybody knows it. The West was won by wagon trains, the East by sailing ships, and they all had plenty of passengers aboard, by necessity working together. "In history," Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin explained, "even the great explorer had been the man who drew others to a common purpose." Try to imagine an individual so rugged he could raise a roof beam...
...look it up. For those who still accept without question the hokum that too often issues from the mouths of eminent personages, Christopher Cerf, co-conspirator in such truly dangerous works of spoofery as Not the New York Times (1978), together with Victor Navasky, editor of that sobersided weekly, The Nation, has collected more than 2,000 of these gems of misplaced certitude. "We can say with some confidence," they say with supreme confidence, "that the experts are wrong without regard to race, creed, color, sex, discipline, specialty, country, culture or century...
...Making the whole production look a little glossier is Lauren Mutton, 38. Her presence in Nashville, where the production was being shot, certainly dazzled Tennessee Governor Lamar Alexander, 42, who named Hutton an honorary "Colonel Aide-de-Camp of the Governor's Staff." The actress one-upped the hokum. Replied she: "Well, Governor, where is the camp...