Word: smug
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...quick images, Maximov slashes a scene in place. His hero, hating the smug, virtuous world, rejects the sympathy of the few kind and decent people he encounters because it is rage itself, he comes to understand, that keeps him alive. "I defend myself against them," he thinks in a rare moment of self-understanding, "with all the fury accumulated in years of wolfish life." Eventually he gives in and accepts society, because he realizes that, bad as it is, it is redeemed by individual acts of humanity...
...permanently limited. Total corporate ownership, depending upon how well individual sales go, could be held to 30% or less. The lower the better! This would create an economic monument to American taxpayers, additional dignity for competent TV A employees, and several measures of in security for the politically oriented, smug, libertine bureaucrats...
...HACK, by Wilfrid Sheed. A kind of Miss Lonelyhearts in reverse, the hero is a successful writer of sentimental pap for Catholic publications, who realizes, with horror, that he is losing his sincerity and developing writer's cramp in the smug swamps of suburbia...
Career Pap. Bert Flax is a sunny, shallow, sincere young man who begins his writing career as a precocious student in a Bronx parochial school, submitting smug little essays to the Catholic press-most notably the Tiny Messenger and Catholic Woman. His subjects run to problems like dirty movies and where the angels go in the wintertime; his most masterly creation is Father Danny, "a lean, clear-eyed man, with a spring in his step and a great fund of natural humility." Bert is so good at this kind of pap, in fact, that he decides to make a career...
...whose politics are somewhat to the right of Genghis Khan. But since the play is rigged for the triumph of good over evil, it is no more intellectually honest than a play that paints the world pitch black. Libel merely caters to an audience's smug self-righteousness, scarcely good growing weather for an examination of moral conscience. Playwright Denker ringingly declares for a responsible free press and due process of taw, which is about as audacious as sponsoring the Ten Commandments...