Word: fatefulness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...supreme irony of fate, the death of a young, innocent boy who probably knew little of hate or history spurred the black community to demand its rights. Stephen, who never tried to wound or even threaten his killers, could have been an example of how to bring change peacefully, but, instead, he is now a symbol for a group determined to destroy and condemn...
Such geysers of emotion are out of fashion; today's movie children are action figures. Yes, girls too. Madeline (Hatty Jones), the heroine of Ludwig Bemelmans' children's books, is an orphan, but she spends little time pondering her fate. Instead, she does what contemporary movie kids have to do: get into cute trouble. She incites insurrection at the boarding-school dinner table, pontificates on a bridge railing and falls into the Seine, plots to set off firecrackers under the feet of innocent visitors--it is all meant to be super delicious...
...afflicted not only by history and by our own fantasies but by "creator" Chris Carter's as well. We watch his series (and, starting this Friday, the movie) as a reverse Truman Show--wishing not so much that the protagonists could be released from their scrapes with fate as that we could join them in the fantasy chaos. It's no accident that our favorite side characters are not the delectably evil Cancer Man (the architect of an imminent armageddon that FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully must stop) or even the beloved, bald Walter Skinner (their boss...
...Chesterton, tolerance is the virtue of people who do not believe in anything. Chesterton meant that as a critique of tolerance. But it captures nicely the upside of unbelief: where religion is trivialized, one is unlikely to find persecution. When it is believed that on your religion hangs the fate of your immortal soul, the Inquisition follows easily; when it is believed that religion is a breezy consumer preference, religious tolerance flourishes easily. After all, we don't persecute people for their taste in cars. Why for their taste in gods...
...wasn't the way the season was supposed to close out. At the very least, Harvard expected to have its postseason fate decided on the court against William & Mary, not Virginia Tech. Regardless of how the end came about, the Crimson continued what is fast becoming habit, hitting a wall at the regional tournament and failing to advance into the Big Dance...