Word: smugness
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...government programs to combat it. He claims that the U.S. government and academics, liberals and conservatives have approached the poverty backwards, once they discovered that the problem existed. Uninterested in poverty relief until 1950, the U.S.'s sudden fascination with the problem at that point stemmed from a smug feeling of post-war cultural and economic supremacy combined with the belief that poverty opened doors for communist take-over...
...around London, the Clash sings straight to-and, in a sense, even speaks for-a generation of working-class kids not only cut off from the social mainstream but disaffected from the smug, cushy sounds of most contemporary pop. Stateside, the audience is different: students, trendy punks, artists and camp followers who cruise the punk periphery like tourists looking to score a season box for the apocalypse. No wonder that, after only the first American date, Joe Strummer was already sounding a little homesick...
...modern world appalled her: "One of the awful things about writing when you are a Christian is that for you the ultimate reality is the Incarnation, the present reality is the Incarnation, and nobody believes in the Incarnation; that is, nobody in your audience." There was nothing smarmy or smug about her religous convictions. She found "external faults" with the church...
...Review, Alumna Gates speaks with horror of her days as a Phi Mu: "The asininity of 'secret ceremonies'; the moronic emphasis upon 'activities' totally unrelated to-in fact antithetical to-intellectual exploration." There was also "the aping of the worst American traits-boosterism, Godfearing-ism, smug ignorance, a craven worship of conformity." Grist for the Gates mill? Never. "To even care about such adolescent nonsense one would have to have the sensitivity of a John O'Hara, who seems to have taken it all seriously." But not while he was in college; O'Hara...
Thanksgiving sometimes runs the risk of sounding smug. The feasting takes place in a world where people die of starvation every day. The self-praises and even the thanks for good fortune are of little use to those who are less fortunate. So if this is a time to give thanks, it is also a time not to take the stored harvest for granted. Americans sense an uncertain and uncontrolled element in their lives. That is evident in the kind of restless discontent that appeared in the off-year elections, not only in the cautious and sometimes contradictory voting...