Word: macbird
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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...
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...
...Perhaps Playwright Barbara Garson should be forgiven for the tasteless liberties she has taken in MacBird [March 3]: she has reminded us that we are lucky to be living in a country where such liberties are generously permitted...
...Poor Barbara Garson! Now that the critics have roasted MacBird into a gilt-edged annuity, she will have to reconcile herself to fame and a fat purse. That's a hell of an albatross to hang on a fully committed protester. If that's what...
Does she or doesn't she know what MacBird is? Only her conscience knows for sure. Does it recognize the distinction between veracity and audacity? Between opportunity and opportunism? Between guts and gall? Between taste and twaddle? These critical distinctions can be blurred in print and in protest. But on a stage they stand out naked...