Word: smug
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Trouble with Being in the Middle" [July 1] is poignantly illustrated by the navel, that useless and innocuous configuration that serves neither physiology nor aesthetics. It merely remains there, indolently comfortable, insouciantly secure and abominably smug. Extremities do have their place in the world, and that is precisely where the middle...
...Toynbee's warning cry for peace has been heard alongside those of the Berrigans and the Quakers and the various experts on Communism who could see that the most damaging and unwelcome intrusion in Southeast Asia was that of Western colonialism. If one looks for the origins of the smug social-Darwinist philosophy held by the LBJ's and the Nixons who perpetrated this war "to save us from the evils of socialism," one finds none other than the Ivy League's (well, Yale's) William Graham Sumner, who probably did as much to push positivistic social science...
...love affair. Its attraction could magnetize the man as certainly as it could rot his art. As the peeling Dr. Eckleberg--monument to America's first age of advertising and god of the ash heaps--mocked the death of Gatsby's dreams, so Hollywood--monster bulwark of materialism and smug summit of the equation--tortured Fitzgerald. Yes, the place could be as hostile to Fitzgerald as West Egg had been to Gatsby. Though both could dream unto death, neither could ever be of either place. But Fitzgerald had the distance to see this. The rich were different, yes, he could...
...tone of the film is never satire, though, because there would be a self-seriousness in that. The jokes just keep the story human without cheapening it. No smug double entendres here; precious few anachronistic references. What makes The Three Musketeers so elusive is that the clumsiness is intentional and built-in, as one might infer from the casting. Yet the movie is deft. Clumsy and deft; uncorrupt and sophisticated; slaphappy and professional; gawky and disarming--the adjectives contradict each other, and one's reaction should be "yes ... but." Instead, it's just a simple unadulterated "yes," with little else...
...Smug Lecture. Tanaka's reply was somewhat evasive; he delivered a smug lecture about Japan's example of hard work and industrial expansion since World War II. He then told the students that in a three-hour meeting with Premier Sanya, he had offered to soften the terms of a $153 million loan and curb overly aggressive and ruthless private Japanese business practices through a new government agency, to be called The Economic Cooperation Ministry. None of this satisfied the students, who left the meeting threatening to "act against every Japanese in Thailand" unless the government acts...