Word: smugness
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...accord left the city with a pair of smug, noncompetitive, conservative newspapers. Not until the gradual involvement of Randolph Hearst, father of kidnaped Patty Hearst and the Examiner's president since 1973, did the old family flagship begin to change. Stirred by a tour of the barrios of several cities, including San Francisco, in 1969, and pressured by his daughter Patty and nephew Willie, who told him that the Bay Area's young ignored the Examiner, Randolph Hearst appointed men in their 30s to the city-editor and news-editor slots, put some life into the paper...
...poet has become an old-man at the fireside not a tortured and self-torturing ego but a satisfied, even smug, old man who can whisper the sentiments of others because he feels them himself...
...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...