Word: aura
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Last week the aura of intrigue was deepened and tinged with scandal when the Army's Saigon command announced that eight Green Berets, including the Special Forces commander for all of Viet Nam, had been detained while the Army investigated charges of premeditated murder against them in the shooting of a South Vietnamese. The commander is Colonel Robert B. Rheault, 43, a much-decorated West Pointer. Also arrested were two majors, three captains, a chief warrant officer and a ser geant first class...
Chandler was also guilty of occasional pontification, but his saving grace was a matter-of-fact, incongruous humor. In Macdonald, the laboring faces and the aura of overhanging doom are intended as symbolic of general existential despair and specific revulsion against California materialism. The trouble is that the symbols are strewn on the page like shorthand glyphs rather than metaphors. As Macdonald used to know, and now seems to forget, the order of imperatives in mystery writing is plot first, red herrings second, and philosophizing last...
Krassner has a point. John Wayne has become one of the pop-artifacts of contemporary life. He carries with him the unmistakable aura of camp and comic strip, as if his conversation came in balloons. As if when he slugged the opposition there would issue forth a thunderous THWACK! and SOCKO! In person, the seamed, leathery face seems an extension of his saddle. A handshake lets the visitor know how a baseball feels when it is swallowed by Frank Howard's glove. True, the unwigged forehead goes clear back to his crown, but the size-18 neck defies collars...
Still, these are minor lapses in a major movie. In terms of contemporary mores and methods, Easy Rider has told its story from the far side of the generation gap. For once the aura of evil that clings to drug-and-motorcycle movies is gone. Like other films directed to-and by-youth, Easy Rider could have settled for catcalls and rebellion. Instead the film has refurbished the classic romantic gospel of the outcast wanderer. Walt Whitman might not have recognized the bikes-but he would have understood the message...
...know Washington better than Nixon, and few place a higher premium on order. The President retains his image of methodical competence. Yet the Administration appears in many ways to be maladroit and insensitive. More and more, comments TIME'S Washington Bureau Chief Hugh Sidey, "there is an aura of ineptitude growing here that could spread to the nation. There is a growing feeling in Washington that Nixon and his men cannot manage the machinery; that it is too big, too complex for them...