Word: america
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...race skews any discussion of capital punishment in America. Arguments against the death penalty focus on the disproportionate number of blacks on death row. What does Jasper give us? Something astonishing: the spectacle of a vicious white sent to death row--for killing a black man. Hence the high-fives among blacks outside the courthouse. The natural jubilation is philosophically inconsistent, of course. It is difficult to argue that whites should be executed but blacks should not. What celebrating blacks really mean is something simpler: it's about time...
...still busy with media requests. Sometimes he does four interviews a day. No, the press doesn't really want to talk about the time in 1997 when he had to spend 20 days in jail for hitting his wife (he's sorry and admits he learned that in America, you're not allowed to beat your spouse). And no, the media don't want to interview him about the time he tried to wrest control of a Vietnamese meditation group called Vo Vi (his critics said he proclaimed himself God; Tran says he left to pursue a simpler life). Rather...
...gathered around Tran's store, Hi Tek, an electronics-cum-video-rental outlet in a cramped minimall in Little Saigon--the unofficial name of Westminster, which lies about an hour south of Los Angeles. The demonstrators unfurled signs declaring, OUR WOUNDS WILL NEVER HEAL! BE AWARE! COMMUNISTS ARE INVADING AMERICA. They are not angry about some controversial video (the rental shelves carry nothing questionable; the most popular tape, Tran says, is a martial-arts epic in which a student of Buddha's sends a monkey angel from heaven to fight evil on earth). Rather, the demonstrators started milling around Tran...
...home, Tran insists he displayed the flag because it's his country's current symbol. Ho, he says, was a "hero" who helped liberate his people. And America is a liberated country, with real freedoms. "I wanted to show the Vietnamese community that freedom means accepting an opposite opinion." He doesn't quite disavow a quest for fame. "Wanting to be famous is just human nature," he says. "But that's not the main point for my actions." Then he asks, "When is my story running...
...them, the great directorial career this award honors--one of the few such in America that actually changed the way people perceive movies--is irrelevant. To them, Kazan, 89, is a traitor who, almost a half-century ago, when anticommunist blacklisting plagued American life in general and show business in particular, "named names" before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), and, worse, has ever since refused to register shame or apology for so doing. To them, precisely because he was the most powerful individual to choose this course, he remains the central symbolic figure in the cautionary political fable...