Word: paranoid
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...weird, edgy stuff, raucous and paranoid by turns. On one side it descends from the Cuban artist Wifredo Lam, whose images of cannibal nature-all claw, tooth and bone-were a significant, though now unfashionable, part of the impact surrealism made on New York in the 1940s. On the other it comes out of a native, down-home strand of buckeye humor, folk forms that verge unconsciously on surrealism: tall Texan stories and Bible Belt grotesqueries. A zoo of critters lurks in Alexander's paintings: snakes preying on rats, rats eyeing scrofulous cats, and so on up the food...
Ostensibly governmental checks and balances work to guard against the zealous efforts of paranoid cold warriors--however, in this case the system worked only by accident. Shared authority in government is rooted in the premise that the judgment of one branch of government--or balance--the views of another; such control is worthless if a given lunacy pervades all government organs...
...characteristic of Berger to endow some of his most unappealing characters with vitality and strength. Rev is a paranoid crank but the only person in the book to take heroic action. To keep matters consistently bizarre, Berger describes the codger's funeral through the eyes of Junior, the teen-age lout: "As he watched the bronze box being lowered into the grave he could not help thinking of that little ditty that went: Your eyes fall in/ Your teeth fall out/ The worms crawl over/ Your nose and mouth. Dying was a lousy thing, and he intended to avoid...
...becomes an apologist for the real Stalinists, the Communist Party USA. In fact, it is Anderson's own popular-front politics ("Just tell them what they want to hear") that are Stalinist, not to mention dangerous for all the struggles of the oppressed. If he didn't seem so paranoid that the Spartacist League "has got to be some right-wing front," perhaps he would be interested in discussing more important political differences...
Anderson cannot argue politics, so he is reduced to ridiculous slander, lies about "physical attacks on leftist rallies." The Spartacists are so "ultra-left," he says, that they must be under the control of the right. This sort of stuff is cheap and sensational. Anderson is either incredibly paranoid or just a plain liar. Dean Wareham...