Word: ventriloquistic
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...grandfather who was a miner," he muses, "until he sold it." The larger its targets, the more petty grows the film. In deliberately choosing to caricature one of the most justifiable conflicts of Western history, War frequently displays a kind of tasteless, nose-thumbing anti-jingoism, as when a ventriloquist appears with a gross, grating dummy modeled on Winston Churchill...
...prosperous Esquire. In June, the magazine's cover took off on Jacqueline Kennedy. In a doctored photograph, Esquire showed her sledding with Crooner Eddie Fisher, under the quote: "Anyone who is against me will look like a rat - unless I run off with Eddie Fisher." Last November, a ventriloquist's dummy made to look like Hubert Humphrey graced the visible part of a foldout cover. Said the dummy: "I have known for 16 years his courage, his wisdom, his tact, his persuasion, his judgment, and his leadership." When the cover was opened, the full picture showed the dummy...
...meanwhile, he carries repetition to the edge of self-parody (The Mutilated) or attempts religious allegories (Milk Train) in which symbols masquerade as wonders. Arthur Miller thumbs disconsolately through a three-hour "Dear Diary" (After the Fall), making moralistic marginal notes on his past. Edward Albee has been a ventriloquist rather than a voice ever since he lit that verbal holocaust between the sexes, Virginia Woolf...
...lady psychiatrist, Capote warmed up to the accusation that bothered him most. "The manner in which Tynan introduces this character," he wrote, "is McCarthy technique at its serpentine suavest. He means to use her the same way a ventriloquist uses a dummy. Tynan is a bully; and true to tradition, he is also a coward. There are some very rotten things he wants to say about me, but he hasn't the guts to come right out and say them himself. Even a man with the morals of a baboon and the guts of a butterfly could...
Before the Sino-Soviet split became public, Peking used little Albania as a sort of ventriloquist's dummy. Albania's fiercely anti-Khrushchev rulers said all the nasty things about Moscow that the Chinese obviously wanted to say themselves. Since Nikita Khrushchev's ouster amid signs of a Russian-Chinese thaw, the Communist world-and its observers in the West-have wondered whether the Albanian line might soften. Last week came the answer...