Word: idealizes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Until I've achieved that ideal--until I can be wholly accurate it describing my own relationship with God--I won't begin to announce what others' relationships should be. I won't try to answer the question Veritas coordinator Kelly K. Monroe posec "How should we...live." Instead, I'll try to figure out how I should live--that more than enough question to keep me occupied for a lifetime...
Hard as it is for some of us to admit, the Dink-Stover-at-Yale days are over. The ideal notion that a lad should just be grateful for the education he receives in exchange for a few hours of practice and the glory of Saturday afternoon is as dead as the dropkick. Who knows what the time of death was? It might have been when the shoe companies began dropping unmarked bills on coaches to wear their swooshes and stripes. It might have been when NBC decided to pay holier-than-thou Notre Dame $38 million for the exclusive...
...search for the perfect mate isn't seen much these days, yet the image of the ideal wife or husband was, not that long ago, a standard and frequently resurrected cultural myth. Vertigo came out in 1956--the same time that My Fair Lady was opening on Broadway. That story too was of a man who shaped a woman to fit his notion of an ideal, or highly improved, form. But over the years the impulse to idealize lovers pretty much disappeared...
...vestige of the ideal-mate image that still goes strong is the Miss America pageant. To be sure, this too adjusted to modern sensibilities last year when it took a national plebiscite on whether the bathing-suit competition should be continued. (Regis Philbin was the host and arbiter; one assumes that Justice Scalia was unavailable.) No matter; the bathing suits stayed, and the pageant remains a context for the exhibition of perfection--that is, if one's view of perfection includes a woman who, upon one's return home, is pounding the piano and belting out an aria from Carmen...
...event, the ideal mate is practically no more, which may be just as well since the ideal anything is always a setup for tragedy. But what has replaced this cultural item is not much more attractive. It is, in a sense, the ideal of the unideal. The assumption behind television sitcoms contemporaneous with Vertigo was that the husbands and wives--in such shows as Father Knows Best and The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet--were perfect for each other. They had their ideal mates; that's why they were married. The assumption behind current shows like Friends and Seinfeld is that...