Word: tormentor
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...peculiar but harmless figure on big-city streets, the lone man walking down a sidewalk, railing loudly at some injustice inflicted by a distant, impersonal tormentor. The angry man who actually acts out his rage usually appears only in films-the demented TV newscaster in Network, for example, who declares war on what he sees as the Establishment and touches a sympathetic nerve in millions of viewers by urging them to shout, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it any more!" But sometimes he appears in real life...
Mentor and Tormentor. Once set, the pattern hardened. As early as 1965 -two years before Eugene McCarthy broke with Johnson over the Viet Nam War-Humphrey produced a prophetic memorandum urging the President to cut his losses and get out. As a result, Humphrey was banished from White House councils. But instead of pressing his case, he again found exclusion more than he could bear. He became a vocal defender...
...Viet Nam had divided the country and destroyed Johnson. Still, Humphrey clung to his mentor-and tormentor. Even in seeking the presidency on his own, he could not cut the cord. Fearful that a public attack by Johnson would destroy him with old-line Democrats and ensure his defeat, Humphrey failed to point the country toward a direction he knew it should go. Only late in his campaign did he step gingerly away from Johnson; when he did, his campaign surged. But it was too late...
...Sullivan operettas--there's nothing here to compare, for example, with the posturings of the Lord Chancellor in Iolanthe or Katisha's ravings in The Mikado--but they still offer marvelous opportunities for comic mugging. Scott Meadow turns in a sharply defined performance as Wilfred Shadbolt, the "assistant tormentor" who eventually wins Phoebe's hand (but not her heart). A typical Gilbert and Sullivan "light heavy," Meadow's Wilfred is too ridiculously self-important and gullible to be really threatening. Carol Flynn also has a few funny moments as awesome Dame Carruthers, responding rapturously to Sgt. Meryll's pained wooing...
...narrator, Tarden, is the agent of the horrors suffered by the brutalized boy in The Painted Bird and perhaps his inevitable successor. Where the boy was tortured by a primitive, irrational peasantry, Tarden is the tormentor, choosing his victims arbitrarily and without passion. As a child of three, he recalls, Tarden plunged a pair of scissors into the breast of his nurse; he remembers watching the purple stain spreading through her blouse. He moves on to varieties of cruelty that defy, one would have thought, imagining...