Word: dumbness
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Born Yesterday is a variation on the Pygmalion story of a dumb girl who gets educated and, in this version, turns the tables on her rich, vulgar husband. The play, which dates from the late forties, was little more than a vehicle for the bizarre Judy Holliday, but this old warhorse could possibly be given a new twist in the light of new attitudes of sexism. At the Ex this weekend...
When Ford became vice-president, naturally, he became better known. Liberal columnists discovered that he was more or less honest but not too bright. They quoted Lyndon Johnson's pronouncement on the subject--"Gerald Ford is too dumb to walk and chew gum at the same time," and they inveighed against Ford's defense of Nixon, against his statement just a few days before the Judiciary Committee voted that the evidence did not support Nixon's impeachment...
...third period, after Ford's assumption of the presidency, most commentators apparently decided--undoubtedly correctly--that it was better to be honest but dumb than to be smart and a crook. "Gerald Ford is Middle America," Time magazine said firmly. As long as Ford continued to cook his own breakfast and refused to follow his predecessor in fattening himself at the public expense, commentaries indicated, all would be right with the republic. Like Lytton Strachey's eminent Victorian, they were obsessed with the ideal of saintliness and convinced of the supreme importance of not eating too much...
...some other fancies as well. Among undergraduates at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C., rides in large coin-operated clothes dryers are the latest thrill-with the door open or, more dangerously because of the heat, with it closed. Admits Junior Steve Wildey, 20: "It sounds kind of dumb. But after a few beers, it seems like an entirely reasonable thing...
...they are so manifestly weird that any reader of Dick Tracy would have a fair chance of finding them. No, he has become an abstract symbol of quick justice in a setting where every bit player is careful to complain that the courts are too slow, the cops too dumb. Moreover, he quickly becomes a pop-cult hero, photographed against magazine posters acclaiming the salutary effect his work is having on the crime rate. Even the police do not want to make a martyr of the man who has redefined the term "good citizen." When they catch him they merely...