Word: polemicists
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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This is vintage Greer, profane and highly quotable. Says Knopf president Sonny Mehta, who was at Cambridge with Greer in the 1960s and who, over lunch in London's Soho, encouraged her to write The Female Eunuch: "Germaine is a force." Her skill as a quick-change polemicist is what gives The Whole Woman its flashes of originality: she takes issues on which most progressive women thought they had positions and sets a standard all her own. You think advances in reproductive technology have been good for women? Well, writes Greer (who underwent failed fertility treatments), "I think it rather...
...planned to form the Texas Rebel Soldiers. "And don't forget," King wrote, "a huge Wood gathering, BBQ and bashing on July 4." Hoover explained that a "bashing" meant killing a black man. King was by now in the process of becoming a white-supremacy polemicist. In his prison writings, he cast himself as a hero in a coming race war with racial minorities and Jews. He drafted proposed bylaws and recruiting letters for his new Klan chapter and expounded on the Aryans, whom he considered to be a "race of individuals who have found themselves existing on humanity...
That's a defense that can end up sounding like "I'm not a bigot, but I play one on TV." If Buchanan has spent a lifetime as a polemicist, however, he's been a nationally prominent one, meaning someone whose most indigestible sentiments have still mostly stopped short of, well, extremism. But how short? The question becomes more than academic now that he is a serious presidential contender. When he derides "the worship of democracy" or calls Martin Luther King "immoral, evil and a demagogue," is Buchanan just pushing the edge of the envelope, or is he tearing...
...remarkable man. An ex-U.S. Marine. A Vietnam veteran. A Jesuit-trained polemicist with what he proudly claimed was the first college degree in futurism. In his workaday job, he was paid by SRI International to peer into the future and tell corporate clients how to prepare for the 21st century...
Seventeen years ago, the feminist polemicist Marilyn French wrote The Women's Room, in which she stated, "All men are rapists." Then with that inflammatory metaphorical extension that is typical of women's-movement rhetoric, she went on: "They rape us with their eyes, their laws, and their codes." The raping, in other words, is literal, figurative, pervasive. If we stick to the literal for a moment, it would be more logical to say, "All men are car thieves." Far more men are car thieves than are rapists. But it is women's vulnerability to rape that cries out. Rape...