Word: imperfectibility
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Cool and detached on the surface, framed by imperfect reminiscences by the gloriously withered contemporaries of John Reed '10 and Louise Bryant, Reds is a soft sell. It gets by with the hoariest cliches of Hollywood romances by understating them, and by distracting the audience with small matters like a revolutionary war. This is an epic without scope: intelligent, ironic, and ultimately unambitious, despite the $30-million price tag and a nation of Finnish extras. And it perfectly reflects the interests and temperament of its director, co-scenarist and star, Warren Beatty...
...story, in sum, is of failure. This is not a good season for the Blazers, a team that had won the league championship just two years before with an exuberant and earnest young team. Much has changed since then. The star player, Bill Walton, has succumbed to his imperfect body, been traded and turned against his former employer for treatment of his injuries. Maurice Lucas, the powerful forward, has grown embittered over his unsatisfactory ($300,000) salary, and his play has suffered. Jack Ramsay, the coach, has tried to adapt his kind of basketball, based on old-fashioned team play...
...course, has not mastered the knack of immunizing against any of them. So the state of the art of cold prevention can be boiled down to a very few words based on the discovery that colds are transmitted person to person, most often by hand. The best, still imperfect cold avoidance program thus consists of washing the hands frequently when colds are about and keeping the hands away from the nose and eyes. The state of the art of curing the cold is simpler still: there is no cure. The adage holds: with proper treatment a cold can be ended...
...American optimism. "Here's for the plain old Adam, the simple genuine self against the whole world." So Ralph Waldo Emerson toasted the American spirit. But the "old" Adam, that rugged and predatory individualist, in his current incarnation is caught in a dilemma: how to survive an increasingly imperfect, not to say hostile, environment...
Special provisions for special interests must be included if we wish to fashion a republican government that will work fairly for all, not in some fortune-teller's vision of a future perfect world, but in our imperfect world today...