Word: johnsonian
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Caveat Emptor! L'etat, c'est moi! Don't it make your brown eyes blue! Not mine, certainly, but I confess to feeling a surge of indignation, all the same, at this fatuous manifestation of a meddling, bloated, neo-Johnsonian "Great" Societish welfare state Gorgon that I had long hoped would never rear its ugly head in the sartorially innocent groves of Eli academe...
...furniture or coins" is not an original one, yet it is amply borne out throughout the book. Boswell's break with Burke, his discussions with the dying Hume, and all his other encounters with the intellectual elite of the day are deftly depicted. There is also an abundance of Johnsonian anecdotes, though sometimes too many. The section on 1784, for instance, deals more with Johnson than it does Boswell, which is fine, except that Brady is attempting to dispel the prevalent image of Boswell as merely Johnson's sycophantic foil. There are already plenty of good biography's of Johnson...
That is about the only L.B.J. boast left unquestioned by Dugger, a respected publisher of the muckraking semimonthly Texas Observer. Every other Johnsonian swagger, pronunciamento and claim is held up to the light for flaws and cracks. According to The Politician, Johnson had a million of them. Dugger interviewed the President at length in 1967 and 1968 but broke off their sessions when L.B.J. began pressing for a puff piece. No one can accuse the author of delivering one. His book is very light on endearing anecdotes, and it is unlikely to match in sweep and detail the first volume...
Jordan's urging of a return to the Johnsonian "Great Society" is starlingly lacking in specifics. In order to construct a more just society we must know precisely who needs help and who does not. To attempt to solve the problems of "Black people" is absurd. If any white politician spoke of solving the problems of "white people," he would rightly be ridiculed. Yet according to the Bureau of the Census, in the U.S. today there exists a more unequal distribution of income among Black families than there is among white families. In 1977 the two-fifthe of Black families...
...virtually all bristle with one-armed bandits. Americans' heightened interest in gourmet cuisine has also been exploited by several lines that serve four whopping meals a day-the usual three plus a midnight buffet. On many ships, the dining rooms and menus aspire no higher than Howard Johnsonian...