Word: smug
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Arrogant & Smug. The burden of Kavanaugh's polemic is that a church founded by Christ upon the primacy of God's love for man has degenerated into a sterile bureaucracy guided by abstract legalism. Echoing charges made by many other contemporary Catholic thinkers, Kavanaugh complains that his church's strictures against marriage for priests, birth control, and divorce have caused untold anguish and suffering to the faithful. Dominated by unBiblical superstition and decadent traditionalism in everything from its sermons to parochial schools, the church, in Kavanaugh's eyes, is pathetically outdated and corrupt...
Launched 15 years ago by Tyrone Guthrie as a wild dramatic dare, Stratford has evolved into a slightly smug civic investment. As a festival it has be come a creature of habit which in theater is not always a loss. Habit decrees the invited guest star-but what if the key actor is as singularly miscast as Alan Bates in the title role of Richard...
...that the end was near. In one of his last letters to Princess Caetani, a sometime patron, he wrote: "It is not enough to presume that once again I shall weave up pardoned, and waddle and gush along the land on my webbed sealegs as musical and wan and smug as an orpheus of the storm: no, I must first defeat any hope I might have of forgiveness by resubmerging the little arisen original monster in a porridge boiling of wrong words and make a song and dance and a mockpoem of all his fishy excuses...
While this lapse--and others--results either from myopia, misinformation, or verbal hysteria, the handling of the actual events of the assassination and the assassin is more disturbing. The author's explanation is smug. The Warren Commission's most controversial theory--that one bullet hit both Kennedy and Gov. Connally--is not challenged. Despite Connally's recollection that the first shot did not hit him, Manchester writes "it had passed through...Connally's back, chest, right wrist, and left thigh, although the Governor, suffering a delayed reaction, was not yet aware of it." Certainly Connally may be wrong and Manchester...
...that don't deal with games, the only really notable one is Tom LaFarge's Ibis-Blot introduction. The Ibis-Blot introduction is the prose found under the masthead, usually two or three incomprehensible paragraphs. The masthead page has always been a bastion of mysterious tradition-who is that smug guy passed out on the keg, anyway? LaFarge has made charming personalities out of the three traditional figures, Ibis, Jester, and Blot. At least we get a hint as to who they are any way they are there. LaFarge has exploited the Castle mystique for all it is worth...