Word: revell
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Arab audiences revel in mellifluous oratory. Last week Egyptian President Anwar Sadat rewarded the Arab Socialist Union Congress with a first-class example of it. Mopping his brow often in a sultry hall, modulating his voice from whisper to thespian holler, Sadat delivered a largely off-the-cuff speech that was twice as long as any address delivered by his predecessor, Gamal Abdel Nasser, and every bit as dramatic. Excerpts...
After the first hurrahs for The Godfather, critical reaction to the movie has snagged on a few key questions. Does it revel in Hollywood gangster melodrama? Does it sentimentalize the Mafia? Does it present the Mob as a metaphor for all business or politics? One of TIME's cinema critics gives his assessment...
...also supporting "solutions" which in fact would work to the disadvantage of everybody--and especially poor people. Wallace set up as the "enemy" not only the liberal-bureaucratic-wealthy-power-structure which radicals attack, but also poor people on welfare and precisely those people on the Left who may revel over his victory...
Meanwhile the rest of America goes homeless. Revel neglects the plurality that elected Nixon president. In Revel's context Spiro Agnew is kept busy fighting a rear guard action against the massmedia. The compulsion to split the country neatly into left and right also ignores the middle class and its love of the status quo. American is not, as he says, "composed of two antagonistic camps of approximately equal size." The nation holds a spectrum of ideologies. Even a division into three parts would be more valid...
...Revel uses extremes as a propaganda device, isn't he allowed some latitude in his descriptions? I might be tempted to accept his distortions, if only the book weren't so grindingly dull. In his efforts to sound like a political philosopher, Revel manages to make his startling premises excruciatingly boring. Without Marx or Jesus neither convincesnordelights. Revel displays so much pompous and artificial scholarship, I even find it difficult to be outraged by his phony ideological posturing. Absolutely rabid francophiles or phobes might be interested in this minor rhetorical gesture. The rest of us should forget...