Word: jeremiad
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...Depraved Insanity." Minnesota-born Gus Hall, 55, the party's longtime "leading spokesman," delivered a three-hour, 30,000-word harangue that sounded strangely like a Molotov jeremiad from the '50s. He denounced the U.S. commitment in Viet Nam as "coldblooded imperialist aggression," "depraved insanity" and, in what was doubtless intended as the most formidable indictment of all, "moral degeneracy with no bottom." Then, contending that the party had "fought its way out of political isolation," he commanded the comrades to unite in a popular front with Vietnik and Negro groups to achieve "left unity...
...Fresh from a week's visit to Saigon, Javits rose on the floor of the Senate to declare that "the President would and should have the support of the overwhelming majority of the American people if he decides to resume the limited bombing." Challenging Mansfield's recent jeremiad foreseeing a "bottomless Asian land war," Javits argued that "militarily, the situation is at least encouraging"; that "the impact of our buildup is just beginning to be felt," and that most South Vietnamese now believe, as they plainly did not a year ago, that the Viet Cong will be defeated...
...Other men drive up in Maseratis and Jaguars; Giulio (Vittorio Gassman) arrives in a Fiat so humble that he won't admit it is his, even after hearing that it has been dented in a collision outside. Other men talk of owning paintings, islands, mountains; Giulio's jeremiad is compressed in the plaintive cry: "I'll never have a boat...
...mirth every emotionally supersudsed subject from sex and death to religion, patriotism, family pieties money, mom, war and the Bomb. They are as well aware as any conventional morahzer that the times are out of joint, but they choose to greet the dislocation with a jeer rather than a jeremiad...
John William Ward, in The Reporter, describes the book as a latter- day "jeremiad," that first peculiarly American literary form wherein Puritan reverends took their congregations to task for real--or imagined--sinfulness. His description of this aspect of the book is particularly apt. William James defined the uneasiness that produces religious feeling as "a sense that there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand." His observation applies to nations as well, especially to one so given to jeremiads as our own. Historians, like individuals, tell and retell their stories, hoping finally to tell them right, to arrive...