Word: pets
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Throughout the play Friedman lances pet hates with an ardor so indiscriminate as to seem bracingly honest. The air is unfogged by any pious cant about brotherly love as he tongue-twits Jews, Negroes, Babbitts, Frenchmen, Chinese, Yugoslavs, white liberals, black militants, wives, husbands, thieves and psychiatrists. From this last and presumably lowest shelf of humanity, the playwright produces a fatuously brain-shrunk specimen who brings his patient-paramour to the chateau. She in turn treats Manhattan's theatergoers to the sight of their first topless actress, but it must ungallantly be recorded that the lady's mammaries...
...Damascus has any flaws, they are the kind that a shrewd trainer and top jockey can handle. Unlike Kelso, who was practically a pet around the stable, Damascus has a high-strung, rankish personality that sometimes loses races. Favored at 17-10 odds in the Kentucky Derby, he was already sweating before the start, folded in the stretch, and wound up third. To keep him calm in the stable, Trainer Frank Whiteley has now put a radio in his stall; Whiteley also dips the colt's protective leg bandages in a peppery solution to stop him from chewing...
Samuel Turner has plans to free his pet slave. The prospect appalls Nat: servitude and this loving master are all that he has known. Yet the foretaste of freedom, as Styron insists throughout the book, can only excite growing hunger. In one morning, in one glimpse of the possibilities of the future, Samuel Turner converts Nat forever into a hu man being burning to be free...
Other people, including his last master, treated Nat decently; but with them it was always the same kind of benevolent paternalism which a person holds towards a valued pet, or a handy ox. The most infuriating thing Nat could imagine was to be submitted to the "wanton and arrogant kindness" of a white man. This ambivalence of race accounted more for Nat's rebellion than did any rage resulting from being intolerably oppressed; it is a theme which Styron has Nat express over and over...
...always a grim affair when politicians use scare tactics to lobby for their pet innovations in national security. It is worse when the Administration gives in to them...