Word: idealists
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Towards the beginning of Chekhov's The Seagull, the young idealist Konstantin stages a play he has written for a critical group of houseguests. The monologue consists largely of pretentious, melodramatic schlock; the audience reserves its praise for Nina, Konstantin's bright-eyed and innocent sweetheart, who does all the performing. The playwright-within-a-play's honest and interesting intentions of reinventing drama get lost amid his overwriting. Only the contemplative old local doctor, Dorn, discerns any promise in the play's pseudo-intellectual rhetoric: "There was something in it... It was so fresh, unaffected...
BACK HOME IN NEW YORK CITY, HER friends and relatives know Lori Berenson as a compassionate idealist, an innocent waylaid by her concern for the poor and oppressed of Latin America. Rhoda Berenson, a community-college physics teacher, says the very notion of her 26-year-old daughter's being involved in violence "is absolutely ridiculous." A friend since junior high school, Daniel Radosh, finds it "hard to reconcile what they are saying about her with the gentle person I know...
...bold idealist and naive college student, the idea of working only to benefit one's neighbor is frighteningly seductive...
Although Altman alludes to Nazi and Soviet death-labor camps--extreme examples of human inhumanity--the idealist editor fails to describe the nature of contemporary chain gang labor. Instead, Altman compares the disease-ridden prison camps of early 20th century America to the most horrible places of extermination know to recorded history. Alabama prisoners who today collect waste from the roadsides, and who suffer through heat, cold and embarrassment, face only the indignity which they brought upon themselves, rather then the certain and horrible death which millions of innocents endured merely because they were born. Mr. Altman, comparisons such...
...idealist...