Word: maudlin
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...insensitive analysis of the Rosenberg case is atypical. Strout believes in the promise of America and seems personally offended when it goes unfulfilled. Never maudlin or saccharine, he grafts the mentality of the Rugged Individualist onto a compassionate New Deal liberal. After Robert Kennedy's assassination, he says, "Think of all the fat little editorial writers sitting down at their typewriters, putting themselves in a properly melancholy mood and then dashing off an inspired article on "the shame of America." He then talks about the real shame of America: the failure of the cowards in Congress to approve gun control...
...were spying on political activists, the commission persuaded the late Mayor Richard Daley to establish a citizens police review committee made up of appointees whom they recommended. Even government corruption is a target of the more aggressive commissions, like those in Chicago, Kansas City, and New Orleans. Says Frank Maudlin, an ex-highway patrolman who heads the Kansas City commission: "Organized crime runs hand in hand with the corruption of officials...
...concert's a benefit performance. The money's going to aid liberation movements in Africa. It's going to help Nkomo. It's going to help ZAPU. Perhaps $100,000. Sure. There's a song that Bob Marley sings called "No Woman, No Cry." It's a sentimental, almost maudlin song. It is about a poor man who must leave his home to escape poverty. He leaves behind a woman who shared his poverty, his street fighting, his love for life. But the song promises that he will return one day. In that song are the lines...
...grown obsessively kiddified; they were child-worshipers who sentimentalized their offspring in a complacent land of Little League and Disney. Toward the end of the Eisenhower years, the literary critic Leslie Fiedler wrote a lively diatribe about the "cult of the child," which he denounced as "this most maudlin of primitivisms...
Returning to the land and living off it is a stubborn American dream. It persists even though small farmers are leaving in droves. Without being maudlin about it, Perrin laments their passing and the dis appearance of a way of life that knit hard ships and satisfactions together. He never pretends that part-time farming is the same as the real thing. But by clearing fields and keeping boundaries intact, he at least stages a holding action against total loss. And telling others how he has done it preserves that hold...