Word: swiftian
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During World War II he called pacifists "fascifists"; yet later he pleaded for clemency toward German war criminals. When half the Western world referred warmly to Joseph Stalin as "Uncle Joe," Orwell in 1946 produced his Swiftian satire Animal Farm, with its caricature of a U.S.S.R. where leaders are pigs and their motto is "All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others...
...syndicated column Today and Tomorrow in 1967, he remained a close observer of world events. When he died last week at 85, he left the unfinished manuscript of his 27th book. Its working title, The Ungovernability of Man, reflected another, different 18th century strain in his character, an occasional Swiftian despair at the aberrations of the "minor Dark Age" into which he had been born...
Adapting the audacious lawlessness of the porn movie to his Swiftian demolition of untrammeled appetite, his parable, as many critics have read it, of the collapse of modern society, Ferreri has arrived at a tantalizing blend: the dirty movie with the heart of an impassioned medieval moralist. The director has the puritan's inevitable fascination with sin and corruption: he's titillated by what he shows us, but he's repelled, too--and it's that moralistic disapproval, that unconcealable sense of shock, that separates his work, for all its salacious preoccupations, from that of the true, unstricken pornographers...
Whatever symbolic or ideological potential the story of La Grande Bouffe might have had, whatever opportunity for Swiftian outrage or the savage surrealism of a Bunuel, is extinguished by Ferreri's obstinate insensitivity. It could conceivably be argued that the film is a metaphor for the fate of a society sated by its own prosperity, obsessed by its own comforts. It is difficult, however, to credit such subtleties to a director whose idea of a good visual pun is a man holding a turkey between his legs while a woman cuts the squealing bird's head off with...
...presidency." McCarthy had tossed out much the same idea in a radio interview at the peak of vice-presidential speculation during the Democratic Convention. Said he: "You know, in some tribes they pick the purest man in the tribe and then have him pick the chief." The Swiftian modesty of proposing the Vice President as kingmaker is resonant with possibilities: What if the choice were left to Spiro Agnew? Or, for that matter, to Thomas Eagleton...