Word: phantasmagoria
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...ride in a big, black Hudson; he lives on an occasional hamburger, sleeps happily in thickets, in barns, on lawns. The little towns of the Midwest, the hitchhikers, lunchroom girls, farmers, high school kids, old people, down-and-outers, all pass by in Prokosch's limpid prose, phantasmagoria hauntingly created but incredible in a landscape sensuously seen, smelt and touched but unrecognizable. It is the same with Author Prokosch's ponderings: relevant, plausible, portentous and flimsy. Aware of the flimsiness, he attributes it to his material: "No crisis or tragedy [in America] becomes exact. The great struggles...
...this phantasmagoria, from beneath this flood of (to most of the audience) incomprehensible Greck came a show, a swell show, a hit! There was none of the respectful boredom with which the audience greets far too many Classical Club productions. Instead the stiff-shirted, bespectacled audience let down their back hair and roared with laughter, applauded like...
...window and stares maliciously at Vag with evil eyes. He opens his well-toothed jaws and measures the distance to Vag's head. There is a metallic crash as teeth meet the iron skull. Vicious fool, you cannot get Vag. See, Vag does not even blink. This is mere phantasmagoria compared to The Four encountered on The Bottom. They were truly fearsome, especially to one numbed with the icy breath of the Great Fear, one who cannot fight back. The Four had come at him--zing, zing, zing, zing--like that. Vag had blinked four times, and flinched...
Hard-headed Charlie Taft scoffs at the idea of a U. S. autocracy or Fascism. To him Al Smith, Mark Sullivan and Republican alarmists who proclaim the New Deal's march toward dictatorship are simply shadow-boxing with political phantasmagoria of their own making. As for Franklin Roosevelt's broken campaign promises of 1932, he asserts that any politician who maintains complete consistency "assumes his own infallibility and will destroy his country if he stays in power." An invitation to him to deliver a Lincoln's Birthday address last winter was promptly withdrawn after a brief statement...
...subject of taxing every corporation's undistributed income under a blanket rule, Mr. May referred to the phantasmagoria of special terms and exceptions which the House Ways & Means Committee had produced in its efforts to correct specific injustices, observed: "I do not think it is possible to anticipate all the serious injustices. . . . Once you begin to make exceptions there is no logical place at which you can stop...