Word: daydream
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Comic strips, says Waugh, abstract bits of American experience and endow them with a sort of idealized timelessness. Dick Tracy always catches the crooks he chases; The Nebbs always quarrel; Blondie and Dagwood always make up. It is part of the American daydream, he thinks, to be as courageous as Steve Canyon, as sexually irresistible as Smilin' Jack, as honest as Joe Palooka. In his harried, uncertain life, the American newspaper reader is greatly sustained by the certainties he finds in the comic strip, the movies-and nowhere else...
Before Jamestown or Plymouth was founded, two European artists roamed the forests of North America. They found the New World as lovely as a daydream and as weirdly frightening as a nightmare, painted it with wideawake precision and detail. Last week their historically priceless pictorial reporting, long scattered and out of print, was reissued in one of 1946's handsomest books (The New World, Duell, Sloan & Pearce...
...does the sexual promiscuity of Brave New World seem so very distant. In a few years, no doubt, marriage licenses will be sold like dog licenses, good for a period of twelve months. . . . Dictator[s] will do well to encourage that freedom. In conjunction with the freedom to daydream under the influence of dope and movies and the radio, it will help to reconcile [people] to the servitude which is their fate...
...ignorant days of Sherlock Holmes and Arsene Lupin, the thriller was a mild, usually non-murderous affair in which there was nothing more bestial than a hound with phosphorescent jowls. Today, when "emancipation is complete [and] Freud and Machiavelli have reached the outer suburbs," the pulp thriller is "a daydream appropriate to a totalitarian age . . . a distilled version of the modern political scene, in which such things as mass bombings of civilians . . . torture to obtain confessions . . . execution without trial . . . drownings in cesspools, systematic falsification of records and statistics . . . bribery and quislingism are normal and morally neutral, even admirable when they...
Less than two months, ago, Slick Airways was still just a daydream much like the daydreams of 100,000 other soldier flyers. Unlike most others, this one was backed by 1) plenty of cash and 2) rough-&-ready business savvy. Both were supplied largely by two brothers, dark-haired, studious Thomas Baker Slick Jr., 29, and sandy-haired, easygoing Earl Frates Slick, 25-Money & Ideas. The Slick brothers are sons of famed Tom Slick, "king of the wildcatters," and stepsons of Oilman Charles Urschel* (after Tom Slick died, his partner Urschel married his widow). The brothers were not content...