Word: macdonald
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...about equal to inflow from Nigeria. Last week the Canadian National Energy Board issued a report showing that the country could lose self-sufficiency by the early 1980s if exports to the U.S. continued at present levels. Accordingly, Ottawa's Minister of Energy, Mines and Resources, Donald S. Macdonald, announced that exports to the U.S. would be cut by 100,000 bbl. by Jan. 1, even more later in the year, and would possibly be phased out altogether by the 1980s unless Canadian production was increased...
What makes Macdonald original, perhaps irreplaceable as a pan-critic (in both senses of "pan") is in fact a latent romanticism. More than his victims can appreciate, he is a genial curmudgeon, teetering on the very edge of hope. He growls partly to keep from being played for a sucker. Macdonald might even be called an American Bernard Shaw, if Shaw had written only prefaces or if Macdonald had written plays. Besides, that is to say, these marvelous little one-act monologues, featuring the persona he made of himself. ·Melvin Maddocks...
...Macdonald explains to her and to the reader: "I've always specialized in negative criticism-literary, political, cinematic, cultural-because I've found so few contemporary products about which I could be 'constructive' without hating myself in the morning." If Macdonald is disappointed by American culture, he is "appalled" by American politics. His "time-tested anarchist principles" have made him almost as hard on fellow leftists as on Goldwater Republicans, and perhaps hardest of all on liberals. Drawing from the back files of Politics, the superb little magazine he edited and published (and often practically wrote...
...writer, Macdonald has the soul of a middle linebacker. Crunch! goes the hit, opinion foremost like an elbow to the head. But the art of Macdonald lies in the way he wraps up a victim after he has wobbled him. (1), (2), (3), (a), (b), (c)-he smothers his foe with Q.E.D. exercises in logic and item upon item of proof. As he closes in for the kill, Macdonald may mimic the cries of the wounded. He offers spot-on parodies of Norman Mailer, Wolfe and circa 1938 TIME-"celebrated last month by potent Newsmagazine TIME, its fifteenth birthday...
...What do Macdonald's windmills have in common as the tiller sees them? Humbug. Cant. The special form of dishonesty that betrays itself as lack of style. Irving Howe once complained that if Jesus were to deliver the Sermon on the Mount tomorrow, "Dwight Macdonald would write that while 'Mr. Christ makes some telling points' they suffer from syntactical confusion and 'a woolly, pretentious style.' " Macdonald's answer: "Were the Sermon woolly," that would be "my reaction, and I should be right, since in that case the Sermon would not be the great moral...