Word: avatars
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...President, if artful, can transcend mere policy and become an avatar of an era. What difference will the final ascension of the baby-boom generation make in terms of the American spirit, the cultural zeitgeist? The irresistible Kennedy parallel would suggest that the symbolism of a Clinton presidency could someday outweigh its concrete accomplishments. From fashion (a continually bareheaded J.F.K. decapitated the hat industry) to sports (touch football and 50-mile hikes) to dallying with movie stars (Marilyn Monroe suggestively cooing "Happy birthday, Mr. President"), Kennedy defined a style that was half Harvard and half James Bond. But J.F.K. spoke...
...carried within herself more than her share of the calamitous contradictions of this century. She was born bourgeois in Berlin, avatar of some of the best in modern art and much of the worst in modern politics. Her father died when she was a child, her stepfather was killed in World War I, and her hopes for a career as a violinist were ended by a hand injury. By 1929 she was making a career on the German stage and screen. It was then that another of this century's perpetual emigres, gifted, egomaniacal Josef von Sternberg, noticed the "cold...
There were obviously differences among those cases. Castro had the backing of another, now deceased superpower. Ho was a nationalist waging a civil war, as well as a Kremlin ally waging an ideological one. Khomeini was the avatar of Islamic rage against the West. But they also had something in common: by dodging American bullets, sometimes literally, each enhanced his standing in various quarters of the Third World...
...great performer, for starters. More than Julia Roberts or Meryl Streep, Madonna is the modern movie star because she has created her own roles: boy toy, Marilyn Monroe avatar, Penthouse pinup, sly feminist, scandal magnet. With docile avidity, the world has eyed this procession of Madonnas, each one an incendiary variation on the last. The gag is that despite some fine screen work, she has never quite made it in Hollywood, a failure of the moguls, who haven't figured out how to channel her charisma. She is not one to wait for other people to do her a favor...
HARVARD University fancies itself The Premier University of the West. It is the vanguard of Classical, European and American thought, jealous guardian of its own cultural capital. By virtue of its history, Harvard has become the avatar of the American intellectual tradition. President Derek C. Bok frequently speaks in the most effusive terms on the responsibility of the education system to the American citizenry to a global community...