Word: zoot
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Good Communists have long frowned on the capitalistic, zoot-suited squares who resist the muscular dedication of their People's Republics. They call them variously hooligans, Bikinists (after the big bomb and the little bathing suits) or just plain Schlurfs. Last week a 25-year-old, gun-toting Schlurf named Jan Brzoza was up before a Polish court, charged, along with three accomplices, with robbery. The court decided to make an example of Brzoza and sentenced him to death on the simple grounds that if a Bikinist is not already a traitor he will probably be one before long...
...Senator Joe McCarthy ("the only leader in America today showing strength, character and direction"), but the 800 screaming followers who gathered in the school auditorium to greet Mosley might have been waiting there ever since the late 1930s. There were the same blond bully boys, the same zoot-suited spivs, the same middle-aged women, and the same intellectuals ready to follow any leader raucous enough to give strength to their neuroses. On a table in the corner, there were even the same penny pamphlets, now boosted to tuppence by inflation...
...course, dress at Harvard is a fairly static, conformist affair. Zoot-suits, funnel shapes, and one-button California drapes were never in order: it's always been (or at least, for as long as we can recall) the three-button jacket with sparely padded shoulders...
...whom must we credit these pivotal votes? To Eisenhower, yes, but just as much to the McCarthys, the Jenners, the Kems, and the Cains, who did so much to clothe the GOP and its nominee with the garb of witch-hunting which at first was their own exclusive zoot suit. And, we believe, it was Eisenhower's enthusiastic espousel of the Reds issue which attracted the countless worried Catholic voters, his constant pounding on supposed softness, and his promise to root out Pinks, that elastic category of intellectuals whose confines are ever-widening in the current drive for conformity...
Shoes, it seems, are shoes, and ever more will be so. Stockings are seamless, in a noble effort to appear like no stockings at all. Handbags steadily grow larger. Suits, too, are ant-shaped, with zoot jackets...