Word: tinhorn
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...speak of a "man of respect," a phrase suggesting, at its darkest reach, a gravitas that can not only hurt but even kill in order to enforce that respect. Gravitas is a phenomenon of power, but the forms and styles of power are various. Dictators are forever strutting the tinhorn's impersonation of gravitas. Brute power is only one of the cruder types, and it is sometimes subdued by other forms: a moral gravitas, for example. Martin Luther King Jr. brought his gravitas to bear against men of power who were morally vacant. Gravitas may be aggression...
...Occasional readers of the form tend to confuse Ross with John D. MacDonald and Gregory Mcdonald. The first was born Kenneth Millar in 1915 and died three years ago of Alzheimer's disease. The second is 69 and lives in Florida, as does his popular P.I. Travis McGee, the "tinhorn knight on a stumbling Rosinante from Rent-A-Steed." The third is a former Boston Globe critic and the inventor of the flippant Fletch, whose snooping is sanctioned by a press card rather than a badge...
Tyrone is a failed actor with a tragedian's soul and a Broadway tinhorn's compulsion for self-abasement in bad booze and worse sex. Josie, the daughter of his Connecticut tenant farmer, has adopted the manner of a slut in order to hide her Madonna's heart. Their tragedy is that their one night of (sexless) love comes too late. From it they achieve not redemption but a brief, bittersweet memory; not" I enough, one suspects, to light their separate darkening paths into the future...
Such arguments, not surprisingly, largely fall on deaf ears in America. The growing consensus on the need for a new order is dismissed as Soviet propaganda mouthed by tinhorn Third World dictators--as if none of the 40 million that will die could have figured things out for themselves...