Word: essayed
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...find it hard to imagine such a society, not because it was so cruel -- in that regard, pre-Columbian Mexico was no worse than 20th century Europe with its wars and concentration camps -- but because its cruelty, as Paz points out in his catalog essay, was indissolubly part of its "senseless and sublime" theological and moral system. "The Mesoamerican vision of the world and of man is shocking. It is a tragic vision that both stimulates and numbs me. It does not seduce me, but it is impossible not to admire it." So might some Russian of the 3rd millennium...
...useful to look at that proposition from the perspective, however distant, of Luce's essay, which was an attack on the isolationism...
Published nine months before Pearl Harbor, Luce's essay conceded that fighting in World War II was not really necessary as a matter of defending "our homeland." The U.S. could be made impregnable and might live, "discreetly and dangerously," like "an infinitely mightier Switzerland...
Today what seems more striking than the almost quaint idealism and the bombastic style (forgive me, Harry) is the degree to which, shorn of rhetoric, the essay proved to be a realistic program, anticipating the Marshall Plan, Truman's Point Four call for American technical assistance abroad, the Kennedy Peace Corps, Food for Peace. America as a powerhouse of democratic ideals, as the champion of freedom and the source of material sustenance and technical expertise -- all animated U.S. foreign policy the past half-century...
...ESSAY: "The American Century" was no illusion. What's more, a second one could -- and should...