Word: straitjacket
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...first admired his books, while tracing down literary influences that ranged from Buchan (the chases, the praise of friendship) to Beowulf. Then, with such popularity, the story was denounced as escapist fantasy, its success owlishly attributed to "irrational adulation" and "nonliterary cultural and social phenomena." Attempts to straitjacket Tolkien's story as contemporary allegory were updated too. In the '50s, critics averred, Sauron was really Joseph Stalin and fumbling, heroic Frodo was the West...
...into horror and, as they describe it, the purging of the evil within the souls of their young fans. Alice the leader sometimes throws live chickens to the audience, axes dolls to death, carries a snake that sometimes works its way between his legs with phallic suggestiveness, wears a straitjacket, and in final mock penance has himself executed either in a blinking electric chair or on a full-size gallows...
Incendiary Issue. Seeking to break out of the fiscal straitjacket, Nixon is seriously studying a "value-added tax," which he may propose to Congress as early as March. A kind of national sales tax, the VAT would collect a percentage of the cost that is added to a product as it moves from raw-material supplier to manufacturer to wholesaler to retailer. For example, when a furniture maker sold a carload of chairs, he would pay to the Federal Government perhaps 3% of the difference between the raw-material cost and the selling price of the product. This would...
Rabbit, traumatized by Janice's betrayal, first abandons his stoic straitjacket. He is re-awakened to what Updike calls "new areas of sexual and psychic penetration" by a rich teen-aged "hippie" named Jill. He is then confronted directly with the problems which have caused his confusion--Vietnam, racial strife, local revolutionary struggle--when he takes in a young black war veteran. Skeeter attempts to give a metaphysical basis to explain social conditions--something Rabbit instinctively needs...
Vampire Bat. Ozzie, played with translucent poignancy by Tom Aldredge, is tortured by lost youth, lost potency, lost possibilities. He cries out for a past when he wore no straitjacket: "I was nobody's goddam father. I was nobody's goddam husband, and I could run-nobody could run the way I could run-run for the sun." That is pain distilled into compassion, a special gift of David Rabe's, Harriet (Elizabeth Wilson) is one of those mothers who likes to think that she only "lives for others"-as selflessly as a vampire bat. David...