Word: humanism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Rococo Invective. For a practicing iconoclast, however, Mencken chose surprisingly feeble icons of his own. As a young man, he fell for Nietzsche and his doctrinal fantasy of the Ubermensch. As misread by Mencken, Nietzsche provided license to despise the human race and delight in all things German-as epitomized by beer and Brahms. Politicians were rogues. The church was only a racket. People in general were boobs. Such were the underpinnings of Mencken's rococo invective. But when serious matters were involved, his philosophical resources were meager and his thinking often callow and jejune...
...correspondent novelist. In The Bamboo Bed, he approaches the struggle in Viet Nam not as a three-dimensional event but as the frighteningly abstract piece of surrealism that we all share on the evening news. Black comedy, myth, shaggy parables of the top secrets of the human heart-these are the literary forms war takes for Eastlake...
Like a volcano sucking in human sacrifices, Eastlake's war engulfs everyone who comes near it-including two trustful flower children wandering through the jungle with a guitar and a button reading "I have a dream." Even they are not pure victims. Love and life may perhaps be enough for women, Eastlake sadly suggests. But men all share a terrible curiosity: What beast -or possibly what hero-will they turn into at their moment of private reckoning with...
...neither did I come to initiate the revolution. For revolutionaries are simply too human to be trusted with carrying out a revolution, however badly it might be needed...
Unlike the characters, the audience is let in on the mistaken identity aspects of the plot from the beginning-and that's the point. Wilder wants us to share with him his contemptuous laughter for all affairs human...