Word: evil
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Cassandra's Scream. Amusingly caustic is Steiner's account of the literary bootleggers who pour new psychoanalytic wine in the old stolen bottles of the Greek myths. Gide, for instance, produced an Oedipus "who arrives at the extraordinary insight that his marriage to Jocasta was evil because it drew him back to his childhood and thus prevented the free development of his personality." White forgoing these lapses of taste, T. S. Eliot merely domesticates the Greek myths till they are as tame as Old Possum's pet cals...
...clerical and authoritarian, lacks the more demonic and dynamic features of fascism. Yet in the long run, there is no doubt that Franco lost the propaganda war; even today, there are those who see the Civil War in simple terms as a battle between democracy and fascism, good and evil. "The Spanish War," says Historian Thomas with detached irony, "appeared as a 'just war.' as civil wars do to intellectuals, since they lack the apparent vulgarity of national conflicts . . . It looked, at least at first, when all the parties of the Left seemed to be cooperating...
...NATION GASPS AT WIDE CONCESSIONS, headlined the Rand Daily Mail, and the head of the temperance movement cried, "I can see only evil arising from this measure . . . Africans don't drink to enjoy it . . . they drink to get drunk." Angriest of all were the shebeen queens, whose brimming vats of fermenting rotgut would become unsalable when their thirsty black customers finally could walk around the corner and buy the real stuff...
Reason Is Evil. To the romantic temperament, nothing succeeds like excess, and Yeats preached the dogma of excess as an esthetic necessity. He applauded Shelley for agreeing with Blake "that Reason not only created Ugliness, but all other evils." Such statements seem slightly more reasonable when Yeats is placed where he belongs, with the first wave of what might be called the Counter-Industrial Revolution. His obsession with myths, magic and symbols was a poet's way of fighting the machine. In a poet's intuitive fashion, he was plumbing the "collective unconscious" before Jung labeled it, celebrating...
...Loose." Time after time, Johnson ignored the niceties of diplomatic language to tax his translators' skill with a homier sort of rhetoric. "There is an evil force loose in the world," he cried in Saigon while offering a toast to South Viet Nam's President Ngo Dinh Diem. "Its purpose is to get what we've got if it can. Another way to put it, as we would in my native hill country, is, 'The fox is loose, Mr. President. He's after the chickens and you live in the chicken house.' " Johnson grandly...