Word: idealist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...corrupt burghers. Von Bohm (Armin Mueller-Stahl) is an honest public official whose idea of an evening's entertainment is to watch the test pattern on his new TV set. Unaware of Lola's occupation, Von Bohm takes her on a date to church-such are the idealist's hopes for a spiritually healthy postwar Germany-and falls in love with her. The Blue Angel trajectory is established: Von Bohm must discover, understand, compromise, surrender. Fassbinder has lighted this ordinary nightmare as if every boardroom, bedroom and bathroom were on the top floor of the worst little...
Liberator. Warlord. Patriot. Power-mad. Those are some of the terms that Bashir Gemayel's deeply riven countrymen have used to describe their President-elect during his years as a leader of the Christian militia forces. Part political idealist and part storm trooper, Gemayel, 34, has shown he will use whatever means necessary to achieve his nationalist goals. His supporters argue that Lebanon's dire condition requires just that sort of toughness. Opponents claim that he is a fierce political animal dedicated to narrow sectarian aims...
Words can be impregnated with feeling by oversimplification. People who oppose all abortions distort the position of those favoring freedom of private choice by calling them proabortion. And many a progressive or idealist has experienced the perplexity of defending himself against one of the most peculiar of all disparaging terms, do-gooder. By usage in special contexts, the most improbable words can be infused with extraneous meaning. To speak of the "truly needy" as the Administration habitually does is gradually to plant the notion that the unmodified needy are falsely so. Movie Critic Vincent Canby has noticed that...
...newly planted crops seemed to violate every American tradition-and it did-Wallace was even more furiously criticized for deciding to slaughter 6 million baby pigs rather than let them grow to full size. The son of Calvin Coolidge's Agriculture Secretary, an eminent plant geneticist and an idealist with presidential aspirations, Wallace was as appalled as anyone by the butchery. It reflected not the ideals of "any sane society," he complained, but an emergency caused by "the almost insane lack of world statesmanship" in stabilizing food prices...
Perhaps the most remarkable of all the New Dealers was Harry L. Hopkins, a gangling and often brusque idealist who, in the words of one acquaintance, gave off "a suggestion of quick cigarettes, thinning hair, dandruff, brief sarcasm, fraying suits of clothes, and a wholly understandable preoccupation." Born to poverty as the son of an Iowa harnessmaker, Hopkins had worked one summer among the slum children of New York City's Lower East Side, and that experience turned him into a professional social worker. When the Crash came, Governor Roosevelt made Hopkins head of New York's emergency...