Word: reflexively
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Wakefield is an incurable essayist. He takes the sting out of his reporting chapters with neatly balanced explanations of the self-evident. An absurdity is either absurd or it is not; a horror brings on the gag reflex or it does not. What reporting there is seems true enough, though Wakefield's modest conclusions will startle few ordinarily demanding readers. But a competently drawn nostril, ear lobe and eyebrow do not add up even to a sketchy portrait; the well-fed, worried face of supernation deserves a better effort...
...ITEMS in the Journal are not so helpful or insightful. One is a reprint from the Columbia University Forum of Conor Cruise O'Brien's "The Counterrevolutionary Reflex," which wearily argues that the United States should not have such a Pavlovian response to communism and revolution, and stops there. The second in particular is Columbia graduate student Samuel Anderson's prose poem, "Mr. Moynihan in Bedford-Stuyvesant." Certainly there are other ways to assert a black identity than by continuing to put down Monynihan. Moynihan's criticism of the American welfare system may still someday make it easier...
...left with the impression that most human feelings are absent in Tarbox. Though Piet has a momentary infusion of paternal love, it seems like no more than a nod to that feeling on the part of the author, a reflex in his own character. Piet eventually leaves his two young children without any deeply anguishing regrets. Children in Tarbox are mainly encumbrances to their parents. They are bundled up and transported, even when sick and feverish, so that the couples may continue their adulterous visits. It is the children who finally give an air of pathos to the network...
...There's something about the man that reacts to a Kennedy," an aide remarked last week of Lyndon Johnson. To be sure, there is something about the President that reacts to any meaningful challenge to his authority, but the response is reflex and relentless when the defial comes from a Kennedy. True to form, scarcely 48 hours after Robert F. Kennedy became an open rival for the presidency, Johnson launched a massive counterattack. During a week whose pace and tempo seemed more attuned to the windup of a bitter election than to its opening hours, the President made...
...Johnson. Only three, in New York, Oregon and Tennessee, were willing to come out publicly for Kennedy. The initial reaction among congressional Democrats, even those sympathetic to Kennedy personally and on the major issues, was one of alarm rather than support. "He'll ruin the party!" was the reflex comment of several Capitol Hill Democrats. Most congressional Democrats and party officials in the states know that they face a tough campaign already and that a fight at the top can only make their own problems more serious...