Word: evil
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...become a genuine folk hero, identified in Java with a 14th century Prime Minister who built a great empire, and in Bali with Vishnu, the god of rain. Many of his countrymen believe that Sukarno is blessed with kesaktian, a supernatural magic power that protects him from evil and makes him superhuman. Palace servants used to sell bottles of his bath water to peasants, who hoped that by drinking it they would inherit some of his magic...
...catastrophes of the 20th century have restored to favor cyclical philosophies of history with their implications of recurrent patterns of evil. The electronic rapidity of instantaneous information everywhere makes the plot and story line of the well-made play seem slowpoky. The modern play is all middle like a Happening, all now. Unable to conceive of a destination, it coils endlessly around its theme. Genet's The Blacks begins and ends with identical scenes; so does Ionesco's The Bald Soprano. Almost nothing has happened. There is the suggestion of unalterable and eternal repetitions in human behavior. Pinter...
...remained for a seemingly minor incident in Jerusalem to illuminate the quality about Eichmann that Historian Hannah Arendt has characterized "the banality of evil." One day after a court session, Eichmann was shown a film: here were Jewish victims packed like cattle into trains; here were Nazi execution squads shooting down rows of naked men, women and children, who fell writhing into trenches that they themselves had dug; here were literally thousands of corpses being bulldozed into mass graves. Suddenly, in the darkened room, Prosecutor Hausner heard Eichmann stir. Hausner wondered if the ice-cold technician of the final solution...
...space. The Eastern mode, on the contrary, is to create a balance with nature and to identify even with nature's terrible aspects. India's mother goddess, giver of life, is also black and bloody Kali, the bringer of death and destruction. The West divides good and evil, and thinks evil can be destroyed-St. George killing the dragon, the Virgin crushing the serpent beneath her heel. The Hindus revere the serpent as the symbol of all nature, good and vile together. Asians generally are capable of believing that something is simultaneously good and bad, right and wrong...
...John F. Kennedy were born to wealth and flaunted shamelessly expensive tastes (while no one was much interested in Nixon's poorboy origin). Roosevelt demonstrated a characteristic of the classic hero, who, according to Historian Wecter, "envisages his era as a crisis, a drama of good versus evil, and himself as the man of destiny. In a sense, he must be a hero to himself before he can command that worship in others." Kennedy's record is mixed, and the assassin's bullet cut it short before it was completed. But he, too, was a hero...