Word: evil
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Maybe goodness is as imponderable and mysterious as evil...
...describe is not fully understandable. We know about the Teutonic strain of extreme self-righteousness, Germany's economic chaos between the wars and about the ideology that found a target for this bitterness in the Jews. We have Hannah Arendt's concept of the banality of evil, which suggests how good citizens, following orders given by other good citizens who were also following orders, could have run the death camps. We know in great detail how the rounding up and the killing were done...
Those who do not look kindly on Thompson's scream-of-consciousness writing style consider his stuff to be no more than "pseudo-literary exhibitionism," the product of a burned-out mind and of little significance to anyone but academics doing studies on the evil effects of narcotics. William F. Buckley Jr., writing in this week's New York Times Book Review, predictably attributes Thompson's work to "a very nearly unrelieved distemper," and comments that he "elicits the same kind of admiration one would feel for a streaker at Queen Victoria's funeral...
...play's points that Caliban, for all his subhuman qualities, is superior to the civilized royalty who wilfully embrace a career of corruption and evil. Shakespeare distilled the idea in Sonnet 94, which ends, "Lilies that fester smell worse than weeds...
...black Caliban is a racist act and turns the play into a white-supremacist tract. They need to examine the play more carefully. For one thing, King Alonso is on his way home from marrying his daughter to an African king. More important, Caliban is far from the most evil character in the play. It is true that he has tried to ravish Prospero's daughter, but he was not born to reason or to know right from wrong; he is not immoral, but amoral. It is also true that he plans a rebellion against Prospero. But Prospero...