Word: puritanic
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...controversy once again spotlighted the shadowy tightrope of paradoxes that the Helmsmen must walk in the interests of a nation that cherishes openness and fair play. The debate pitted the Puritan ethic against the pragmatism of cold-war survival. It matched the conspiratorial methods necessarily practiced by intelligence agencies against the emotionalism of young Americans who worship honesty. It aroused the outrage of many in the academic community who-mistakenly-regard CIA as an evil manipulator of foreign policy. And the furor showed again how readily Americans, who, while seldom acknowledging the quiet and generally successful performance of their intelligence...
...painting, the Puritan knight Hudibras visits an astrologer named Sidrophel to seek advice on how to win the hand of a wealthy widow (see opposite page). It is clearly a case of one fraud patronizing another, and when Hudibras sees the astrologer's ludicrous array of tools-a stuffed crocodile, a Jacob's staff-he feels duped, and the two men quarrel. In another picture, a bloated effigy of Hudibras is ridden to a fiery stake by people who are finally fed up with Protestant reformers...
Neither prude nor Puritan, Hogarth sought to lay bare the foibles of his England. Yet he was no revolutionary; he wore the scarlet coat of a gentleman, and respected the Crown. He married the daughter of the man who painted murals in St. Paul's, eventually succeeded him as Serjeant-Painter to Kings George II and III. He began life as an apprentice silversmith, wound up with a country house and six servants...
...Obverse Puritanism. This is a generation of dazzling diversity, encompassing an intellectual elite sans pareil and a firmament of showbiz stars, ski whizzes and sopranos, chemists and sky watchers. Its attitudes embrace every philosophy from Anarchy to Zen; simultaneously it adheres above all to the obverse side of the Puritan ethic-that hard work is good for its own sake...
...publicized sexual laxity, which in turn produces a high rate of divorce, abortion and venereal disease, cannot be called anything so simple as immorality, he argues: the Scandinavians are merely honest when it comes to sex. "To the Nordic mind, Americans and Englishmen are sexual hypocrites: their pretenses are puritan and Victorian, while their performance is entirely the opposite...