Word: humbug
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...Humbug...
...seems clear: even if Orwell had joined the cultural shock troops, he could never have remained with them long. More than anything else in the world he despised such "smelly little orthodoxies," and his mind was at its most joyous and acute in sniffing out the contradictions in official humbug. Unlike Koestler and Borkenau--both former Communists--Orwell had never been able to muster any enthusiasm for intellectual hooliganism; an Orwell who had become convinced that it was necessary would have been a broken man. It seems likely that he would have withdrawn from politics and simply...
...remained almost unaware of my political loyalties." Clearly he often wished that this might have happened; but in the same essay he wrote, "It is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally...
Throughout U.S. Journal, a collection of Trillin's New Yorker pieces, the author reportedly lands like a benign ordering presence-deus ex-machine gunner-amidst chaos, humbug and hoopla. Covering a great deal of ground, he is naturally sympathetic toward other traveling men. He writes about a Dow Chemical recruiter who in 1968 had to go from campus to campus, removing his shoes to step over antiwar demonstrators, and try to answer such polite undergraduate questions as, "I was wondering if a Dow employee could be prosecuted as a war criminal ten or 15 years from now?" Elsewhere, Trillin...
...chilly street corners. A brisk song, a quaint sermon. A bunk for the stumbling drunk. Even that perennial embarrassment, an outstretched tambourine and a copy of The War Cry thrust suddenly into the midst of the regulars at the bar. Courage. Honesty. Efficiency. Trouble in the Salvation Army? Humbug...