Word: satirists
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...legal litigation is distasteful, a fact reflected in proverbs like: "Win your law suit and lose your money." Life is regulated more by custom than by law. The ideal demands that disputes be settled by mediation and compromise. "The Chinese people love compromise," said Lu Hsün, a satirist who died in 1936. "If you say to them," This room is too dark, we must have a window made,' they will oppose you. But if you say, 'Let's take off the roof,' they will compromise with you and say, 'Let's have...
...imparted to a play that juxtaposes the somber drum roll of the Kennedy funeral cortege with such inane Shakespearean mutations as "Oh whine and pout/ That ever I was born to bury doubt." But MacBird's basic flaw is that Playwright Garson is a frivolous, scattershot satirist who has no moral vision of her own to counterpose whatever might be regarded as evil in her characters. She has written an apolitical play in which all choices seem silly. The Ken O'Duncs are presented as chilly, ruthless opportunists; MacBird is a mixture of corn-pone cajolery, scheming ambition...
Another sign of Playwright Garson's ineptitude as a satirist is her determination to testify in the courtroom of drama to so many things she knows to be not true. Her tactic for showing aversion to the Viet Nam war is not to question the logic of that war but to imply that Johnson, like Macbeth, has "supped full with horrors" and is an unfeeling, bloody-minded monster. Unwilling to concede the humanity of others, she reduces her characters to caricatures. They eventually take their revenge by draining MacBird of most of its fun and all of its life...
ECCE HOMO by George Grosz. Grove Press. $15. Germany's savage satirist, who died in 1959, represented by some of his finest thrusts at pomposity and obtuseness. The drawings and water-colors done in the between-wars period reflect Grosz's deep pessimism as he watched the wavering fall of the Weimar Republic, with Hitler waiting in the wings of history. "Once you have glimpsed these corrosive portraits, these street and bedroom scenes," writes Author Henry Miller in a foreword, "you will never forget them...
...nobility of commonfolk and the commonness of nobility from beneath wrinkles and warts. Dela croix used his works as models for copy ing. In admiration, Novelist Honoré de Balzac said of him: "That fellow has Michelangelo under his skin." Yet the world's most famous satirist with brush and pen cost his country 12 francs in 1879 to be put into a pauper's grave...