Word: evil
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Cute fuzzy creatures come to life, the kids magically fly through the air, evil is conquered when the hero learns to believe in himself, and we are living another high-tech sitcom from the suburban psyche of Spielberg and Lucas (whose firm had a part in the film's extensive special effects...
...mindset, particularly his characterization of the nation's current political mood as "reasonless xenophobia." This mindset sees improper jingoism in such movies as Rocky IV and Rambo. It views them as irrational, or at best incredibly simplistic. These movies present a fairy-land world of American virtue versus totalitarian evil; and since the world really is not anything like this, these movies are "shameless propaganda." Worse yet, the electorate might really start to believe this stuff and vote for a president who will lead us into war. And, as everyone who is clear-thinking knows, America's wars are usually...
...certain people are so enraged over these latest patriotic movies and not upset over so many other similar films in our past. For decades after World War II Hollywood produced scores of movies in which America's war against Fascism was presented as a struggle between good and evil. The loss of German and Japanese life in them is in many cases greater than the loss of Russian and Vietnamese life in Rambo. Yet I've never heard anyone react with moral indignation against these simplistic portrayals of what was the most humanly costly war ever known to man. Even...
...would be wrong, though, to attribute our longing to escape to modern ills alone. In the late sixteenth century, Montaigne wrote: "The evil means men use in our day to push themselves show clearly that the end is not worth much. Let us reply to ambition that it is she herself that gives us a taste for solitude. For what does she shun so much as society? What does she seek so much as elbowroom...
...feed the sun and thus keep it moving. The arrival of the Spaniards in no way destroys this mythical tradition. Cortez' arrival, for example, is explained by the myth which tells of the redeeming God Quetzalcoatl who would come from the ocean to save the Mexicans from the evil god Huitzilopochtli. From its origins, history and myth become permanently linked...