Word: heroisms
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Mobs have an evil dynamic. An ethnic tribe, at its worst, is a supermob. A sense of narcissistic self-pity that is merely contemptible in an individual is transformed to heroism in the tribal context: a fierce, virtuous assertion of the group. That is why ethnic grievance -- a rising force in so much of the world -- is so dangerous. When the subjective goes tribal, the self-indulgence of one man or woman comes frighteningly alive, collective, suddenly legitimized, glorious even. What would be individual shame now blossoms into shamelessness. The weak and vicious transfer their worst defects to the larger...
...Patrick Shanley, sounds as if poorly translated from the Spanish: "What have we done that God now asks us to eat the bodies of our own dead friends?" Dissing aside, that makes for a poignant ethical dilemma and a telling religious metaphor. But Alive strands its theme of haunted heroism -- what's inside a man that compels him to survive -- in a snowbank of failed ambitions...
...what it doesn't show: the collision, the sight of May-Alice's mangled legs, even a clip from , the old movie she watches during the edgy vigil of her recovery. Passion Fish is an antidote to a male-buddy uplifter like Scent of a Woman. It suggests that heroism is found not in the public victories we achieve but in the intimate truths we learn to accept...
Americans are desperately concerned about the corrupting effects of the mass culture on their children. They are rightly aroused by grade school curriculums that present homosexuality as just another life-style choice. They know instinctively that single parenthood, for all the heroism it summons from women, is the surest path to childhood poverty. They want to rebuild "family values" -- but they refuse to see the rebuilding as an act of religious war. And when they hear their concerns transmuted into appeals to intolerance, they tune...
...Garnier, home of the Paris Opera Ballet, after a performance of his staging of La Bayadere. He needed dancers' support to stay upright. He was gaunt and emaciated, but the style was defiantly intact -- he was swathed in a huge gold-and-scarlet cape -- and so was the fiery heroism...