Word: nonconformist
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What a pleasure to have Mr. Morris Freedman pinpoint an ill of our times-the self-righteous, smug, pseudo-cultured attitude of the nonconformist [Dec. 15]. I am not ashamed of the lump in my throat when hearing The Star-Spangled Banner, and am utterly sick of the apologetic manner of many Americans who seem to think everything here uncouth, while everything European is cultured and avantgarde...
...then there are the non-nonconformists who wouldn't be caught dead with their beards down or their big toes showing, and who occasionally take a perverse pleasure in astounding their nonconformist neighbors by defending Dulles or admitting that Marilyn Monroe might strike a chord of response after all. This super avant-garde attitude will soon be superseded by an equally avant-garde reaction of non-non-nonconformism, and so forth...
Waiting for R. & H. "I was a big slob," says Pat of her days at San José State. Translated by a friend, this means that she was a nonconformist Nisei. "Pat and I ran around with Caucasians," says the friend. The strained social relations resulted in many heartaches, and when the hurt was deep enough, Pat became deeply Japanese. Once when a boy she was fond of threw her over, Pat sliced off the ponytail hairdo that has since become her trademark. "I'm shorn of my pride anyway," she said, "so I cut my hair." Her parents...
...There is no more self-righteously, high-mindedly closed a mind than that of a nonconformist," writes 38-year-old Morris Freedman, longtime freelance writer (New Republic, Harper's) and associate professor of English at the University of New Mexico. Freedman's complaint, published in the Phi Beta Kappa American Scholar: nonconformism is getting to be more orthodox than conformism, especially among intellectuals in college communities and in the publishing, advertising and entertainment professions. "The nonconformists are right," says Freedman, when they accuse the majority of mass thinking and responses. "Yet it may easily be shown that...
...strictly orthodox is the nonconformist that it is impossible for him to say "a good word about Dulles, Nixon, Lyndon Johnson . . . James Gould Cozzens, or a bad one about Henry James, Adlai Stevenson, Lionel Trilling or Freud; to express approval of any television show (except Omnibus, Ed Murrow or Sid Caesar) or of any American movie (except the inexpensive and badly lighted ones, or the solemn westerns, like High Noon); to dislike any foreign films (except those imitating American ones); to believe that you can buy ready-made a good hi-fi set; to wear a non-ivy-league suit...