Word: emperors
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...expands consciousness and extends life--it's oil, LSD and Botox all in one. (Spice is an excretion of Dune's giant sandworms, but people ingested weirder stuff for less benefit in the '60s.) Harnessing his powers and the Fremen's fanaticism, Paul leads a rebellion that makes him Emperor of the galaxy...
...Children, Paul--now both Emperor and god--realizes that the revolution he unleashed is out of his control, and he sets about trying to dismantle his own legacy. These themes and the environmental focus (the Fremen's new prosperity threatens the ecosystem on which their culture and spice depend) attracted co-star Susan Sarandon: "The idea of raping the environment for the profit of the few," she says, "and the idea of justifying a war in the name of some...
...concludes that the feverish drive to Westernize left the insular nation with a permanent identity crisis and a bad case of cultural indigestion. But his diagnosis is subtler than most: he suggests that the reactionary forces that led Japan into World War II promoted myths of Japaneseness?including the Emperor cult?that were themselves based on ideas borrowed from the West. In short, Japan's cultural schizophrenia runs deep. It explains, Buruma writes, why many Japanese today believe that foreign pressure?gaiatsu?is needed to force the nation to reengineer its wheezing economy...
...Buruma, nothing in modern Japan is completely Japanese. Even the myth of a divine Emperor, he contends, was assembled using imported parts. The old samurai who wrote Japan's first constitution in 1889 borrowed the nation-building blueprint of Europe's wiliest soldier, Otto von Bismarck, transforming Shintoism from a nature cult into a unifying national faith by grafting on German dogmas of military discipline and national essence...
...Critically, Japan's new conscript armies were made accountable only to the Emperor, who was cast in the role of a living deity who would reign but not rule. Starting in the 1930s, Buruma writes, this "militarist monster" lurched from Manchuria to Pearl Harbor as factions of courtiers, generals and bureaucrats jostled for power, their decisions often driven by fanatical subordinates in the field...