Word: evil
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Song of Liberty" is essentially a celebration of life without restrictions and compartments: a celebration of man free and whole in the "Eternal Delight" of his being. That's what "Pray For It" and "Pavilion" are finally about-and that's what might actually clear away some of the evil spirits in our lives...
Thus the American ethos-part pragmatic, part Puritan, part Pelagian-has had the synergistic effect of masking the popular consciousness of evil. Traditionally, evil has been something distant, Wholly Other, rather than an enemy within. When Rap Brown complained that "violence is as American as cherry pie," most Americans dismissed the charge as the aberrant nastiness of a Black Power fanatic. When the Kerner Commission proposed that America was a racist nation, the U.S. public reacted with "Who, me?" protests of innocence. But there is a dark underside to American history: the despoliation of the Indian, the subjection...
Today's young radicals, in particular, are almost painfully sensitive to these and other wrongs of their society, and denounce them violently. But at the same time they are typically American in that they fail to place evil in its historic and human perspective. To them, evil is not an irreducible component of man, an inescapable fact of life but something committed by the older generation, attributable to a particular class or the "Establishment," and eradicable through love and revolution. In fact, the fight against evil is more complex. "Good and evil, we know, in the field of this...
Searching other times and places, Americans can cite greater or more frequent crimes than Pinkville. But one massacre is more than enough. My Lai is a warning to America that it, like other nations, is capable of evil acts and that its idealistic goals do not always correspond to its deeds. "Those whom the gods would destroy," wrote the late Thomas Merton, poet and monk, "they first make mad-with self-righteous confidence and unquestioning self-esteem." In the light of My Lai, Americans have little cause for feeling self-righteous, and much reason for self-reflection. The massacre...
...prism of psychoanalysis, self-discovery is seen as the first step toward sanity. Individuals are not identical with nations, but sometimes they are analogous. And thus it can be argued that only the nation that has faced up to its own failings and acknowledged its capacities for evil and ill-doing has any real claim to greatness...