Word: ignoramus
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...spin of the initial conversation-and the dialogue of the American Democracy and Chinese Communism was thus skewed by their first official contact. The spokesman of China was Mao Tse-tung; the spokesman of America was Major General Patrick Hurley. Mao was a genius, Hurley was an ignoramus, and Hurley's arrival in Yenan during that first week in November 1944, to begin American negotiations with Chinese Communists, is a classic instance of the derailment of history by accident...
...Wilde, he made a success by reversing traditions. To believers, he played the village atheist. To prohibitionists, he was a beery provocateur. To the U.S. at large, he was an intellectual who saw culture only in Europe. "The average citizen of a democracy," he announced, "is a goose-stepping ignoramus ... The average democratic politician, of whatever party, is a scoundrel and a swine...
...When his wife brings up Gavino's illiteracy, Efisio dismisses her misgivings and assures her that their eldest will learn quickly. He then quizzes Gavino on multiplication tables, greeting his son's off-the-mark guesses with a palm planted squarely on Gavino's right cheeck and shouts of "Ignoramus!" Gavino's blue eyes burn with an all-too-familiar rage, but when his father is called, Gavino and his family dutifully follow into another room. But we can see in his eyes that Gavino Ledda has resolved never again to submit to the open palm or branch-switch wielded...
...Critic Reza Baraheni describes one of the men who tortured him in Iran's notorious Committee Prison, where Baraheni was held without charge for 102 days in 1973. Baraheni, who now lives in exile in New York City, recognized in torturers like Azudi the "typical thick-necked Iranian jahel [ignoramus], fat and tall and dirty and, at the same time, shrewd, irrevocable, irresistibly virile and strong." Azudi insisted that prisoners address him with the honorific title "doctor," as do equally brutal thugs who run torture centers in Brazil and did so formerly in Greece. The title, apparently, confers...
...Surrealist Max Ernst, which will remain after the family leaves. It has a seven-foot mink coverlet, trap doors for lamps, telephones and stereo controls, as well as accompanying sun and moon medallions at the head and foot, and a lithograph of Ernst's painting The Great Ignoramus. The Rockefellers have also contributed a dozen pieces of furniture, including Korean and Japanese chests, which will remain after the family vacates the house...