Word: tumbrels
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...fade away." There is such a thing as cruel and unusual punishment; the concealed show in Terre Haute was unusual, but not exactly the work of Vlad the Impaler. Is there something preposterous about executing a mass murderer in such comfort? What if he'd been wheeled in a tumbrel through the streets of Oklahoma City, to be execrated and spat upon on the way to a guillotine on the spot where the Alfred P. Murrah Building once stood...
...Harlequin romance: she sees "a man in a dinner jacket with more heat than any star in the room...his height, his sleekness, his newly cropped, iron-filing hair." Forget, wrote Brown, "all the Beltway halitosis breathed upon his image...the neo-puritanism of the op-ed tumbrel drivers." Instead, say yes to the electrical, existential Now of Bill Clinton: "He is vividly in the present tense and dares you to join him there...
...Opiate," published late last year in The New Yorker. In it, he brings off an excruciating knock-knock joke in French-en route to his conclusion about the uses of laughter in the gloomy present: "In this age penumbral,/Let the timbrel resound in the tumbrel...
...Johnsons entered what she calls "the Valley of the Black Pig."*She was frankly alarmed by demonstrators: "Through every pore, you sense a sort of animal passion . . . What if I had suddenly broken into a run?" What she did, of course, was assume her "riding in the tumbrel" stance-shoulders square, head high, smile in place...
MacBird! by Barbara Garson has been awaited with all the fierce anticipatory noises surrounding a tumbrel arriving at the guillotine. Long before the play's off-Broadway opening last week, an honor guard of coterie intellectuals, including Critic Dwight Macdonald and Yale Drama School Dean Robert Brustein, went into tub-thumping ecstasy over MacBird, which promised a dramatic severing of President Johnson's head. In addition, it capitalized emotionally on a winter of public discontent with L.B.J.-the poll-recorded loss of favor with the electorate, the supposed credibility gap, concern about Viet Nam, Johnson's embroilment...