Word: didion
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...difficult, even impossible, to discuss the situation in EI Salvador without expressing some sort of political viewpoint. Didion makes her own position clear, sometimes explicitly, but usually implicitly. Her unflattering portraits of rightist leaders like Robertod' Aubisson, and her constant comparisons of the Salvadoran reality she perceives with the White House's roster view demonstrate her opposition to current U.S. policy. And she mocks the notion that true progress has been made on the human rights front Indeed, she finds a language common to Washington and the Salvadoran Right that has replaced the word "change" with the word "symbol...
...TRAGEDY OF Salvador goes much deeper than cynical politics or even the dangerous ideological posturing of the United States and the Soviet Union. For every physical death, there are countless more moral ones' each and every murder debases human life and dignity. The greatness of Didion's book lies not in its political argument but in its ability to show the moral decay of a society...
...Didion writes of a visit to a "body dump" outside of San Salvador, not unlike garbage dumps in this country--with the sole exception that human remains replace refuse. Overlooking the dump on a hill, Didion came across a man teaching a woman to drive, with three small children looking...
...masterwork The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt argued that Hitler and Stalin used terror as a tool to fabricate a new kind of man devoid of individualism and self-respect, Didion correctly sees a similar phenomenon taking place in EI Salvador Indiscriminate, random killing deemphasize the value of human existence Murder no longer shocks Salvadorans; it is a natural part of life...
...short weeks, Didion herself felt the terror that every Salvadoran must live. Eating on the porch of a restaurant one evening, she noticed two armed men across the street observing her and her husband...