Word: evil
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...they go on, must do so under different rules. For despite authorities' worst fears that something like this would happen in Atlanta, despite unprecedented precautions and a massive security effort, it is beginning to feel as if safe American soil is turning to quicksand. "The bombing was an evil act of terror," President Clinton said Saturday, vowing to bring the perpetrators to justice. "It is an act of cowardice that stands in sharp contrast to the courage of the Olympic athletes...
Thus the concussion passes through the medium of media. The accidental video's evil instant becomes a sudden, globally repeated icon, replayed insistently until it erases the 1996 Olympics' prior signature of celebration and courage, the image of a young gymnast performing through her pain. In a split second, the story changes utterly, and so, for the moment at least, does the moral of the story. That's what bombs are for--to redirect the story line, or obliterate its earlier meaning...
...enough in history to Oklahoma City, to leave in Americans' minds a conviction, developing like a Polaroid picture, that their nation is somehow in the process of losing whatever may be left of its old immunity. For a long time, Americans have nervously congratulated themselves that terror was an evil native to other lands. The complacent thought picked up, almost unconsciously, on the founding American premise of a new world divinely sponsored, a sort of immaculate conception...
...likely that when right brain and left brain consult with each other and add up the damage, they find that the sum of human terrorism--even of evil--remains eerily constant...
This eerie moment forms the emotional and intellectual hinge of Rafael Yglesias' eighth novel, Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil (Warner Books; 694 pages; $24.95). Unfortunately, it occurs 465 pages into the narrative, well past the halfway mark but nowhere near the end of a long, long reading haul. Psychoanalysis, the so-called talking cure, has rarely, if ever, received a talkier fictional presentation...