Word: fictions
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...when I was confronted by three television vans, a SWAT team, and a crowd of about sixty people. My first thought, having seen America Under Siege the week before, was that some kind of terrorist-hostage situation was unfolding. Life, as usual turned out to be less dramatic than fiction: Sylvester Stallone was accepting an award at the Hasty Pudding...
...that was when the situation began to seem almost surreal to me. It occurred to me that these students were choosing fiction over life, a well-muscled Rocky-Rambo as hero, instead of the motley reality of the Vietnam experience that was parading below their windows. Rambo was a hero--tough, honorable, simple, yet sensitive, devoted to a cause, and a cause that was right. You could root for Rambo. How could these students not prefer him over real Vietnam vets--all-too-real reminders of the ambiguous nature not only of the Vietnam War, but of human beings...
...George Bernard Shaw and "that sovereign of insufferables" by Ambrose Bierce. In The God of Mirrors, Oscar Wilde qualifies for both titles, reducing every crisis to an epigram. Some of them are prophetic. In Dorian Gray, "the bad will suffer. The good will be rewarded. That . . . is what fiction means." Some are merely contrary: "It is always an advantage not to have received a good education." As Wilde arcs over London, he decides that the difference between true love and caprice is that caprice lasts a little longer, and that is his undoing. His infatuation with the unstable "Bosie...
...PACs gave $12.5 million to congressional candidates; by 1984, 4009 PACs were donating $110 million, more than an eightfold increase. House members received, on average, 41 percent of their campaign funds from political action committees, according to Common Cause. The small individual contributor (now almost a romantic fiction) carries little political significance when matched up against the Sunkist PAC, which promises $5000 for every campaign...
...does PLAP decide which problems to litigate? Gideons says that cases which raise important issues such as the First Amendment and which don't involve complex factual matters are best. That's because one difficulty in talking with inmates is telling fact from fiction, says Katherine Kennedy '82, a third-year student who has been interested in prison work since she tutored at MCI-Deer Island as an undergraduate. Kennedy emphasizes the importance of weeding out the facts of the case throughout the entire process...