Word: smugness
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...feelings of inferiority, the supposed unfitness of his whole platoon. The campaign to make Calley into stupid sub-human reached its absurd climax three weeks ago in an essay by William Styron in the New York Times Book Review in which Styron compares Calley to Eichmann, and with this smug analogy, casts the full blame on him for what happened...
...that "there are hardly any real isolationists left," he does not get around much. Doesn't he know that the 20th century is almost over, and that after 70 years we should have learned a few lessons about trying to be the do-gooding, give-it-to-them, smug messiah for all the world's people...
...city "like a wedding party with nothing but bridesmaids." Upon discovering caviar, Esther consumes a pound or so at a magazine luncheon, paving her plate with chicken slices and smearing on the high-priced spread. But she knows that the whole enterprise is phony, that the girls are smug and dumb and, most important, that she is going against her own grain by participating at all. Before heading back to Massachusetts, she flings all her expensive, uncomfortable new clothes from the roof of her hotel...
...beer, or falling in love, or writing novels or painting pictures, or watching the Dick Cavett Show on a color television. But whatever we have been doing, it has been personal and private, and there has been time to think. And most of us have realized that yes, the smug predictions are probably true, and the wave has crested. This is the quietest year at Harvard since Robert McNamara came to town in 1967, and Nathan Pusey's values have been reasserting themselves...
...invasion of Laos was another nightmare of shadow and substance: no one knew when it had begun, no one explained why it was going on. Nixon refused to appear on television and organize us with smug face and hackneyed rhetoric into a movement that, whatever its internal political differences, hated him and wanted, above all, to destroy him and all he stood for. And we were confused, and tired, and we could not understand. And it seemed better to wait for spring...