Word: italian
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...most obvious omission from this year's draft list, however, was, I am sad to say, a Yalie. Apparently the scouts thought John Pagliaro was too slow or too small or maybe they just don't like Italian running backs. But whoever said he isn't fast enough never tried to catch him as he turned it up around the corner, and whoever said he wasn't big enough never tried to tackle him as he lowered the shoulder. And, well, he still is Italian, but so is Franco Harris...
British Author Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange, Beard's Roman Women), a longtime student of Italian affairs and sometime resident of Italy, offers his observations on the meaning of today 's terrorism and its implications for tomorrow...
...moves, salute it. If it doesn't move, whitewash it." Today's militant, if unsoldierly extremists have a simpler philosophy: whether it moves or not, kidnap it. We have seen the kidnaping of a Goya, a Fellini film, the corpse of a great comedian, an Italian political leader. We are shocked, but perhaps some of the shock comes from awareness that we are not shocked enough. We have already imagined most conceivable outrages against law and decency, or had them imagined for us in drugstore bestsellers or films. We are more than ready for the kidnaping...
...present temptation is to think only of Italy as the place where the pseudo anarchists strike with bolder and bolder feats or abductions. We have a vague notion that Italy has the monopoly on banditry−bandit being of Italian origin−and that kidnaping is as much part of the Italian scene as opéra bouffe. (The great master of English opéra bouffe, W.S. Gilbert, was kidnaped as a baby in Naples−an event both Neapolitan and Gilbertian.) And it is true that it has traditionally been hard to think of Italy as tranquil...
...meantime we have to assume that the blackmail of the state, and not only the Italian state through the kidnaping of political leaders, is a technique that we have to live with, and our leaders sometimes die with, to make willingness to be a sacrifice to the law a condition of rising to greatness. There is a price to be paid for the luxury of ambition. The brutality of this view (here is suffering flesh and blood, the law is only an abstraction) is, however, less reprehensible than the assumption we have all started to make, and not just because...