Word: idealist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...awkwardness with quick wit and charm, Brantley is too perfect. If he had been born in midtown Manhattan he wouldn't be more at home in The City--and we're supposed to believe he's never lived off the farm. Brantley should have been played as an innocent idealist thrown into the wild den of Wall Street...
ABSOLUTES RARELY mean anything at all. Certainly they should not form the basis of university governance. One person's idealist is another person's technocrat. One person's inviolable principle is another's stepping stone. Ideas become just only if ther community affected by them accepts them as their own. The role of modern administrators is not to impose principles, but solicit concerns and then convince the community that policies adopted satisfy those concerns are appropriate. No absolutes should exist simply because a self-perpetuating group of seven men determine the existence...
Protecting and leading the men of the platoon are the squad sergeants, who, under the obligatory incompetent lieutenant, control the lives and fates of the grunts. Elias (Willem Dafoe) is the idealist, trying to preserve some code of moral behavior at the end of the world. Barnes (Tom Berenger) is a creature of the war, a drawling, scarred, amoral survivor. Both are killers. The only difference is how they go about it. As Chris describes it in one of his voice-over "letter home," the two sergeants fight "for the possession of my soul...
...Mcdonald, Edgar winner and former arts and humanities editor of the Boston Globe, in his series about the impertinent Fletch, a man who breaks all the conventions. Fletch is young and handsome, not paunchy and timeworn; he is ethically shady and quick to grab a buck, not a tattered idealist clinging to principle; he is snippy not only to those in authority but also to working people and the down and out. Fletch, Too (Warner; 249 pages; $15.95) is Mcdonald's ninth and & allegedly last book about this scamp, although only the second in the chronology of Fletch's career...
...cycles Schlesinger is brooding upon finally seem less a matter of liberal and conservative than the recurring struggle between pragmatism and idealism that knows no party label but takes place at the center of the American soul. The idealist's "excessive righteousness" combines with the Bomb to make Schlesinger reluctantly "apocalyptic," provoking him to his deepest moments. Nearly 25 years ago, he wrote that "history has always seemed to me primarily an art, a branch of literature." Today his neatly combed hair mussed, his bow tie askew, as it were, he writes with a new passion, as a vigorous elder...