Word: macbird
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...wartime baseball players, appointed for writers who Articulate the Concerns of their Time, whose books are eventually parsed to death in intellectual history seminars and who are very thoroughly forgotten by everyone who neither pays nor is paid to read them. Such are Barbara Garson and her skitlet MacBird (I eschew the exclamation point!)--a document, a gadget, a pseudo-cerebral mummers' play in moral blackface. The fact that MacBird's concerns are nearly as unmemorable as its era may prove to be won't modify the play's appeal for future historians; nor can it extend MacBird's predictable...
...last year MacBird (we are told) has been circulating at anti-war rallies and publishers' luncheons, waiting for a cause to happen to it. None did, and the critics made their own. MacDonald, Brustein, Clureman and Robert Lowell declared the play a theatrical experience of sheer delight, even if its political argument was pernicious nonsense; Kerr and Lionel Abel took no delight at all in the politics, and found no other grounds for applause. MacBird's referents in real life are obvious and tangible: a jowly, gutter-mouthed Lyndon Johnson supported by assorted cronies and a megalomaniacal wife; a string...
...taking a good swipe at every available special interest group, MacBird avoids agitprop and falls somewhat heavily into the category of the Interesting. All hysterical remarks about the play's political truth aside, the best that can be said for it is that it provides a vaguely satisfying hour's reading; the worst, that it leaves the reader with a swelling sense of self-satisfaction. After...
...true. MacBird's too easy to attack...
That is roughly how a Barbara Garson of the 1930s might have written the Macbird! of that era. As Robert Bendiner's book suggests, the virulent abuse poured on the Roosevelts by a small but vocal portion of the public matches the feelings of today's left toward Lyndon Johnson...