Word: puritanic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Hawthorne's allegorical short story, Young Goodman Brown, the ingenuous Puritan wanders into the forest one dark night and catches all his friends, neighbors and saintly village elders in mortal sin-in this case devil worship. It might have been just a dream, but it made a lifelong cynic of young Brown. Much the same thing happened not long ago to a young reporter named Charley Thompson, who wandered into Jacksonville. Fla. The sin was not devil worship but pollution, a suitable modern equivalent. And it was no dream...
American humor in its traditional forms -the wisecrack, the tall tale, the deadpan jape, the shaggy-dog story -has both resisted the official puritanism and made it all possible. For more than two centuries, from that subversive puritan Ben Franklin to the wryly theological Charles Schulz, the nation's humorists have operated as a tolerated underground culture. They have conspired to create a fantasy world where good Americans could be as shiftless as Charlie Chaplin's tramp, as cynical as W.C. Fields never-giving-a-sucker-an-even-break, as lecherous as Groucho Marx prowling a bedroom. American...
...fact is, however, that he may not be as emancipated as he believes. Enter, quietly, the new anxiety that dares not breathe its name. The reverse puritan takes his pleasure as aggressively as he once took his work. Having fun has become his new duty. "Feel!" has become the new moral imperative. The original puritan denied the feelings he had. The reverse puritan boasts of feelings he does not have, writing rubber checks on love in capital letters. Captive to a new perfectionism, he flagellates himself equally for his marginal failures at orgasm and for his secret indifference toward minorities...
...Orwellian conformity is reassuring to those of us who are apprehensive of the Administration's plans to "bring us together." That Mr. Douglas prefers not to pattern his private life after the neo-Victorian vogue prevailing in Washington is understandable. That Mr. Douglas abhors crass censorship in the puritan tradition of Increase Mather is not only praiseworthy but also healthy...
...Puritan Ethic scored a partial victory over the Sexual Revolution yesterday...