Word: life
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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THERE is little in the life of William Laws Calley Jr., whom G.I.s of his old Americal Division now refer to noncommittally as "that lieutenant." to suggest that he would become the focal figure of controversy in so horrible a nightmare as the My Lai massacre. To his hometown friends in Miami, he has always been known as "Rusty," for his reddish-tinged brown hair. He was born in Miami 26 years ago, and grew up with his three sisters in a two-story stucco house in the city's northeastern section. Mrs. Arnold Minkley, who lived across the street...
...phenomenon is almost too basic to be faced; responses to it have ranged from Rousseau'sinsistence that evil is illusory to Jean Genet's perverse, delighted acceptance of it as life's only real value. For the atheist, evil is the ultimate testimony to the meaningless absurdity of life. If God's will implies th torture of an innocent child, insists Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov, "I most respectfully return him the ticket...
...collective historical experience of America is such that it has not really contemplated the question, much less tried to answer it; since De Tocqueville a succession of travelers from older and supposedly wiser civilizations have concluded that the U.S. lacks a tragic sense of life. The observation is largely true; the explanation is the varied strands of thought that, welded together, constitute the conventional wisdom of the American ethos...
...particular heresy of Americans that they see themselves as potential saints more than as real-life sinners. Seen in the transfiguring mirror of patriotism, the history of America is a record of triumph over adversity, moral earnestness and accomplishment. America's libertarian achievements and idealism certainly justify great pride; and the nation's technological record in taming nature is one of the world's wonders. But Americans have insufficiently considered the possibility that this record is also tarred with betrayals of the nation's democratic ideals, and that no nation has a solitary, superior claim...
...sensitive to these and other wrongs of their society, and denounce them violently. But at the same time they are typically American in that they fail to place evil in its historic and human perspective. To them, evil is not an irreducible component of man, an inescapable fact of life but something committed by the older generation, attributable to a particular class or the "Establishment," and eradicable through love and revolution. In fact, the fight against evil is more complex. "Good and evil, we know, in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably," said Milton. The West...