Word: moralist
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After that she became the wittiest journalistic headhunter of the '70s. The list of her victims is long, but the names matter less than the grounds for their execution. Like all good essayists, she was basically a moralist, sketching types of irresponsible privilege (Schiff), proprietary righteousness (Betty Friedan), oracular emptiness (Theodore White), poses of profundity (Gail Sheehy) and head-over-heels self-infatuation (Brendan Gill...
...find him still more to be commended for having freed the Christian moralist from the tiresome necessity of having some principle for distinguishing between a legitimate and an illegitimate use of Scripture...
Reinhardt was a great purist; he was also the chief gadfly and moralist of New York art in the time of its first big flowering, the '40s and '50s. Which does not imply that other artists in the New York School lacked probity; only that Reinhardt made such a fierce point of showing where he thought art could go wrong, become soft, betray its essence. He was a fine aphoristic preacher, irresistibly quotable, and a deadly parodist. He listed the technical skills of the modern American artist as "brushworking, panhandling, backscratching, palette-knifing, waxing, buncombing, texturing, wheedling, tooling, sponging . . . subliming...
Mario Puzo's classic Godfather recipe combined zesty ethnic ingredients with basic American free enterprise. Good and evil were all in the family. Social values were relative, if not hypocritical. Puzo is not your average moralist. He does not pontificate from the high ground. His view of human nature is subterranean, not to say labyrinthine. The twists and turns in his new novel might have easily confused the Minotaur...
...book's thesis is stark: "The manipulation of America's political and economic system by Japanese and other foreign interests has reached the point that it threatens our national sovereignty." What distinguishes Choate from other recent critics of Japan is that he is, at the core, a moralist; to him, the avidity with which former government officials are willing to work for foreign interests symbolizes the erosion of America's "civic virtue." His is a critique of the familiar, entirely legal, Washington revolving door, recast in patriotic terms...