Word: heroics
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...initially heroic humanitarian effort in Somalia deteriorated into an inept, farcical manhunt worthy of the Three Stooges and reminiscent of the 1989 Manuel Noriega fiasco. The search for Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aideed reached a comic low when 50 elite U.S. Army Rangers, acting on special "intelligence," stormed a building rumored to house Aideed's rebels--only to find a bunch of U.S. foreign aid workers, whom they promptly arrested...
Hollywood sometimes thinks that once people grow up, they no longer have families; their lives turn into the heroic tracking of other people's demons in an endless action-adventure serial. But movies don't have to be only about the pursuit of a one-armed man. They can also be about chasing the dragon tail of filial responsibility -- isn't that a form of everyday heroism? The Mexican hit Like Water for Chocolate proved that American audiences can respond to stories about love and marriage, food and family. The Joy Luck Club and The Wedding Banquet display this same...
...recent essay in L'espresso, an Italian news magazine, Eco finds this unusual emotion dating to a Pagan conception of honor, in the city-states of Greece, taking one's life was a heroic response to a fall from grace. Suicide represented a recognition of grave wrongdoing, and more significantly, a moral catharsis, the individual would regain his honor in society by taking his life, and would preserve respect in the memory of his name...
...irony of the Gardini and Cagliari funerals is not in the pagan association with honor, but in the religious character of the services. The Christianized West has long condemned suicide.. In antithesis to the pagan heroic ideal, the act is associated with a great evil, something more awful even the taking another's life; it is the single irrevocable sin. Yet Gardini becomes a victim, and Cagliari as well, both assassinated by politics...
...funniest and most agrestic of all his paintings were, undoubtedly, the cows -- a snook cocked at Picasso's heroic Spanish bulls. Kippered there on the canvas in their dense yet somehow airy paint, yearning, dumb and absurdly coquettish, they are among the most memorable animals in modern art. Several of them, like Cow with the Beautiful Muzzle, 1954, also contain some of the most inspired and wristy drawing of Dubuffet's career, formed by the brush -- or its handle -- dragging through the thick paint...