Word: public
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...write for a public," says Pritchett. "I write to clear my own mind, to find out what I think and feel." He pursues this Socratic labor seven days a week, nearly 52 weeks a year, writing with a fountain pen on sheets of strong, white paper that he holds on a pastry board. It has been his lap desk for 40 years...
...been the target of so many attacks in recent years that the once highly secret agency is now more familiar to the general public than, say, the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Yet all the revelations by disgruntled former employees and leftist ideologues have not added up to a balanced appraisal of the agency. To a considerable extent, that task has been accomplished by Thomas Powers, a former U.P.I, reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1971 for his coverage of the radical bomber Diana Oughton. With near clinical detachment, Powers has produced a remarkably realistic portrait of American intelligence beset...
...mixture of politics and show business is not merely expedient; it is also natural. Each world, by its nature, plays to the crowd. The politician and the performer equally require public attention and feed on popular adulation. As either politics or statesmanship, government has always relied on a heaping measure of theatricality. Royal pageantry evolved not entirely to oil the vanity of the overlords but also to satisfy the human craving for symbolic ceremonials. The politician's own requirements in a democracy carried things a step further. To win a constituency, the politician must first gather a crowd...
Such news has become commonplace and so is usually received without reflection. But it must be time to wonder how the promiscuous mingling of politics and show business affects the public's capacity to distinguish between imagery and substance. The question is not idle when asked about a society in which Actor John Wayne and Comedian Bob Hope could wind up widely admired not only as entertainers but as political philosophers...
...should remain a skeptical and demanding constituency, but the ubiquitous looming of star performers does tend to turn it into a distracted audience. The capacity to achieve effects by glitter and glamour is not likely to inspire politics toward greater integrity. Nor are theatrical atmospherics apt to move the public to examine more soberly issues that too few Americans take seriously even...