Word: evil
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Sleeping Beauty, Christopher (Superman) Reeve is a goody-goody prince, a sort of prissy Cary Grant in a mail doublet. Bernadette Peters casts her spell as the princess who responds a mite too ardently to his wake-up kiss. The two also play their evil doppelgängers, giving a psychological twist to the old notion that fairy-tale characters are either all good or all bad. In this case, they are both. A gruff woodsman (George Dzundza) narrates the tale with the accent of a Borscht Belt comedian. "I gotta great princess for you," he tells the prince...
There has been nothing quite like this since Franklin Roosevelt survived the court-packing controversy of 1937 and then entertained the idea of running for a third term, insists Political Specialist Richard Scammon. Then too the nation was mesmerized by the man, either his evil intentions or his genius, depending on one's persuasion. Duke University's astute James David Barber calls Reagan "the great diverter," an actor who plays to television impresarios (who, he says, tend to be gullible) by tossing out distracting ideas like New Federalism, star wars and merit pay for teachers...
...Kapuściński's fugitive images of Haile Selassie seem to merge with his visions of Stalin and other Communist leaders who have inflamed the writer's political fantasies. Little wonder that when The Emperor was published in Poland in 1978, this story of an evil autocrat surrounded by craven functionaries was read as an allegory of Communist rule. Who but Stalin, for example, might have justified a famine in the words attributed to an apologist for Haile Selassie: "Between you and me-it is not bad for national order and a sense of national humility...
...Paul spoke of the plight of Poland's private farmers. He praised church-related agricultural groups that had once served as the nucleus of Rural Solidarity for striving "to restore to your work in the fields its own special dignity." Then John Paul counseled the crowd "to overcome evil with good." Said he: "It is the program of the gospel, a program that is difficult but possible, a program that cannot be dispensed with...
...Iris Murdoch's 21st novel. Her fecundity is remarkable, but even more so is the manner in which she has written her books. Allegory, that stately, illustrated progress toward foregone conclusions, worked best in ages of faith, when author and readers agreed on the subjects of good and evil. Such has not been the case since roughly the time of Edmund Spenser and his Faerie Queene, yet Murdoch, a philosophy don at Oxford, has successfully built a career on this outdated literary genre. Her characters manifestly stand for abstract values; they are figures in a pattern of moral design...