Word: mittyism
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...Ultraconservative William Buckley overcome his loathing for the United Nations and accept an assignment last year as U.S. representative on the U.N. Human Rights Committee? "Pure undiluted Walter Mittyism" seized him, Buckley confesses. Single-handed he would hold the world body spellbound as he read from Solzhenitsyn or pleaded the case for Ballet Dancer Valéry Panov. He would cajole, mesmerize, seduce, intimidate the delegates. The soaring Buckley vision of man's rights, in fact, might "repristinate" the jaded international bureaucracy...
Would Buckley abolish the U.N. or pull the U.S. out? Not at all. His book comes out as a lament for the U.N.'s failed trust. Walter Mittyism seizes Buckley again as he imagines a coup in which U.N. military advisers take over and forbid the Arabs to bemoan the plight of the world's poor without sharing their oil, or the Africans to excoriate racism without subduing their own racists. In Buckley's fantasy U.N., too, Eastern European representatives would be required to ask Soviet permission every time they rise to speak. Buckley concludes that...
There is no Mittyism about this. I could never for an instant imagine myself performing the feats of these uniformed supermen; yet thinking about Sunday's heroes does offer relief from mundane cares. When I fall asleep, however, I begin to dream middle-aged dreams. I dream that I am old, egg-bald Y.A. Tittle in high-top shoes, running a bootleg into the end zone on my weary legs. Or I dream of being Sonny Jurgensen, proudly puffing out my potbelly as if it were a chest, fading back and letting go with the most accurate...
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