Word: evil
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Nazi war criminals, he was perhaps the most cold-heartedly sinister, a man so evil that years after the war he could say without reservation, "I will jump into my grave laughing because the fact that I have the deaths of five million Jews on my conscience gives me extraordinary satisfaction." Bierman tells of the death marches--organized by Eichmann--which claimed tens of thousands of lives. And the Hungarian terrorists were no better than the Nazis; in some cases they were even worse. They roamed the streets of Budapest in packs, randomly terrorizing and executing Jews. The city...
...Mother Teresa of Calcutta should commit murder, any court might weigh her amazing life's labor against the evil of the one deed. The murder would be the exception in a life that otherwise displayed merit and extravagantly claimed mercy. But Jack Abbott's vividly ranting book, brutal and brutalized, should have made the jury wonder which was more characteristic of the man: literature or murder. In a long and essentially tragic perspective (in which all consequences are endured, all debts paid), literature performs its redemptions. Mailer's formula is a shallow little mechanism. "Culture is worth...
Soak the story in reality, bad luck, stupidity and evil for a while, and it might marinate into the parable of Jack Abbott and Norman Mailer: the redemption of the distinctly uninnocent. In one sense, the tale is merely a particularly sensational item of literary gossip. But buried amid the blood and chic is an interesting question of principle. Almost everything, as Thomas De Quincey noticed, has either a moral handle or an aesthetic handle. Which handle do you reach for in the Abbott-Mailer case...
...part, nature cared nothing about the five passengers. Our man, on the other hand, cared totally. So the timeless battle commenced in the Potomac. For as long as that man could last, they went at each other, nature and man; the one making no distinctions of good and evil, acting on no principles, offering no lifelines; the other acting wholly on distinctions, principles and, one supposes, on faith...
...Dreamland and remained gray; gray shadows broken and heightened by little bands of neon, when the Bells of the past spoke to Thomas Scott Bell at Harvard, calling in his own mind to him above the clutter and emotion of being tremendously alone in a tone of evil desperation, as if he was their last foothold in the world beyond Dreamland, beyond the world where the Prince Emmanuel reigned supreme, and they now required something from him. Thomas Scott Bell walked in the rain of a Cambridge winter day, unconcerned about an exam later the same day, listening...