Word: evilness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...this has been a welcome change from generations of hokey fairy tales with stultifying lessons: Be nice and wait for your prince; be obedient and don't stray off the path; bad people are just plain evil and ugly and deserve no mercy. But palace revolutions can have their own excesses. Are the rules of fairy-tale snark becoming as rigid as the ones they overthrew? Are we losing a sense of wonder along with all the illusions...
Once upon a time, in a land near near by, there were fairy tales. Brave princes slew dragons and saved fair damsels. Princesses and scullery maids waited for brave knights and true love. The good were pretty, the evil ugly, the morals absolute. And lo, it was good. If you liked that sort of thing...
...Riding Hood as a crime Rashomon, while this year's Happily N'Ever After sent up Cinderella. Broadway smash Wicked posits that the Wicked Witch of the West was misunderstood. This fall Disney (et tu, Mickey?) releases Enchanted, in which a princess (Amy Adams) is magically banished by an evil queen to modern New York City, where she must fend for herself, parodying her princess foremothers as she goes. (Snow White's Whistle While You Work scene is re-enacted with vermin and roaches...
...Emperor was put on trial and charged-quite inaccurately-with being the evil genius behind an international Muslim conspiracy stretching from Constantinople, Mecca and Iran to the walls of the Red Fort in Delhi. Contrary to all the evidence that the uprising broke out first among the overwhelmingly Hindu sepoys, the British prosecutor argued that "to Musalman intrigues and Mohammedan conspiracy we may mainly attribute the dreadful calamities of the year 1857." Like some of the ideas propelling more recent adventures in the East, this was a bigoted oversimplification of a complex reality...
...Robert Baer, a former CIA field officer assigned to the Middle East and Time.com's intelligence columnist, is the author of See No Evil and, most recently, the novel Blow the House Down