Word: smugness
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Career Pap. Bert Flax is a sunny, shallow, sincere young man who begins his writing career as a precocious student in a Bronx parochial school, submitting smug little essays to the Catholic press-most notably the Tiny Messenger and Catholic Woman. His subjects run to problems like dirty movies and where the angels go in the wintertime; his most masterly creation is Father Danny, "a lean, clear-eyed man, with a spring in his step and a great fund of natural humility." Bert is so good at this kind of pap, in fact, that he decides to make a career...
...whose politics are somewhat to the right of Genghis Khan. But since the play is rigged for the triumph of good over evil, it is no more intellectually honest than a play that paints the world pitch black. Libel merely caters to an audience's smug self-righteousness, scarcely good growing weather for an examination of moral conscience. Playwright Denker ringingly declares for a responsible free press and due process of taw, which is about as audacious as sponsoring the Ten Commandments...
...which was sabotaged by Chamberlain's capitulation to Hitler at Munich. She goes so far as to charge the Resistance leaders with sharing Hitler's aims, since they referred to him as a "swindler" and a "madman," but never as a "murderer." This seems a smug academic distinction in view of the fact that no people were tortured more horribly by the Gestapo than Germans who opposed Hitler...
Having known this for a good many years, may I now feel a little smug about...
...would differ from the writer, however, in assessing the role of the liberal or sympathetic white. This role is often complex. He does not respect the colored race genuinely, because it does not command respect. Given this, it is natural that he be smug about his eschewal of overt discrimination. He passes up the latter for the luxury of apparent charity. Conscience is the motivation only because real respect is absent. He will not surrender his smugness; there is no reason...