Word: venomous
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Well, all right. In the years since, even Sophie Portnoy has survived. Now Wylie, the kind of man who spindles and mutilates his phone bills as a matter of principle, has come forth with Sons and Daughters of Mom. Wylie turns his venom from Mom to Mom's long-haired Woodstock children: "second generation vipers" or "arrogant pipsqueaks" given to "self-pity and vacuous dreams." Are the young correct that no one listens to them? Says Wylie: "Too Goddamn many people listen to them...
...mistake. Guilt and parental pressure may force him to bury his true feelings, but "hate in disguise is more dangerous than when it is open." A mother kicked in the shin by her four-year-old, for example, should not react with a hypocritical mixture of hidden venom and saccharin: "We don't kick people, do we? Say you are sorry, darling." Instead, she should vent her feelings honestly and shout at the child "or even swat...
Fair enough. But might I add that these critics ought not be cheap: they ought not feign surprise at a college dean who expects most women to be, either full-time or part-time, housekeepers and child rearers. They also ought to be consistent: the venom at von Stade might well be tossed too at their own daddies...
...tossing venom about is equally cheap in face of what is, after all, a difficult issue to resolve. There is little evidence to suggest that apart from those women educated at elite institutions, most women will in the next generation escape housekeeping and child rearing roles...
Pusey came in for a large share of the Senator's venom. In 1952, while president of Lawrence University, he had been a member of a committee opposing McCarthy's bid for re-election as senator from Wisconsin. Shortly after Pusey was selected as Harvard's new president McCarthy had called him "an anti-anti-red" who had "neither learned nor forgotten anything since he was a freshman in college...