Word: alienated
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...great irony of colonialism is that occupied lands often tell their woeful stories to the world in the language of alien rulers. This is nowhere more true than in the realms of the former British empire. Artists know that ancestral tongues or patois, even when they survive, could not reach a wide audience, while English puts them on a world stage. When John Millington Synge wanted to portray hatred of England's dominance in his native Ireland, he nonetheless wrote in English rather than Gaelic. When Mustapha Matura depicts his native Trinidad, he uses English -- indeed, he has lived...
...There's only one problem with the theory of gays-as-ethnic-group: it denies the true plasticity of human sexuality and, in so doing, helps heterosexuals evade that which they really fear. And what heterosexuals really fear is not that "they" -- an alien subgroup with perverse tastes in bedfellows -- are getting an undue share of power and attention, but that "they" might well...
...life? The premise is that America's sacred statuary memory belongs to things that happened on native grounds. An odor of anti-Semitism sometimes gusts around these dinner tables, the half- stated thought being: It's Jews imposing, trying to push into the American club of myth with their alien memories. Further: Do we have to go through all this again, the hand-wringing, the Holocaust...
...these things happen. The Holocaust is a densely compacted drama of warning that needs to be remembered repeatedly. In the world at the end of the 20th century, geography matters less; borders are porous, ideas go at the speed of light. A European apocalypse is not alien to America. The lessons are here -- played out to an extreme that has become the world standard of evil, a sort of baseline...
Scientists, it seems, are becoming the new villains of Western society. Once portrayed as heroes, they now appear in movies betraying Sigourney Weaver to bring home an alien for "the company" or being oblivious to Susan Sarandon's desperate search for a cure for her son. We read about them in the newspapers faking and stealing data, and we see them in front of congressional committees defending billion-dollar research budgets. We hear them in sound bites trampling our sensibilities by comparing the Big Bang or some subatomic particle...