Word: puritanly
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...desperately in love with a girl who is society's darling. Célimène (Diana Rigg) is a widow of 20, a teasing, witchy, worldly enchantress. She gossips maliciously, she lies, she keeps two other lovers on the string. Yet until she finally rejects him, the puritan Alceste is in tormented thrall to this pagan Lilith...
This "we versus they" syndrome is Tom Wicker's theory of violence in America. Puritan theology may be dead, he says, but Puritanism is eternal in its tendency to divide everyone into two opposed camps, the saved and the damned, the forces of light and the forces of dark, we and they. Only "they," the damned, are violent, criminal, savage, inhuman--the Indians in early America; in more recent times, the "gooks and slopes" in Vietnam. "We," on the other hand, the peaceful, law-abiding, want only to develop our civilization without hindrance, are justified in violently suppressing "their" uprisings...
...have you rolling in the aisles, though it probably wasn't Jonson's intention to get that sort of response--he wanted to instruct as well as amuse. He placed himself squarely in the center of his society, defending true values against all comers front all directions--Puritan and libertine, meek fool and overbearing lout. He played the down-to-earth Aristotle to Shakespeare's Plato, attacking anyone who deviated from his golden mean. This kind of stance can reduce the energy level of a work of art--how vituperative can you be when you're defending moderation?--but Jonson...
...show the flag"--can obscure the style that makes them so enjoyable. It obscures the allusions to literature ("They, for the most part, are also non-College. Worse yet, they are also non-Harvard. What greater sin could one commit in Lilliputia?"), religion ("Pusey was viewed as a stern Puritan who could raise money and handle things"), and political analysis ("I am sure the faculty would call it 'anti-intellectualism.' We can see it in such areas of society as disenchanted students, angry congressmen, disappointed parents, Gallup polls, etc."). Also high finance (the faculty, Schmidt says, wonders why Harvard...
George Melish, the flashy nova of John Lahr's second novel, is not quite Santayana's last puritan, and his cries are more like yelps. He is, in fact, the butt of Lahr's ambivalent sympathy for the generation currently entering middle age-those who succeeded within the old rules only to find that the next wave of hustlers was trying to change the game entirely...