Word: manicheans
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...Administration started out with a hardline, aggressive and Manichean set of policies, or pronouncements, that in nearly every instance gave way to compromise and at least outward accommodation. This was true of attitudes toward the Soviet Union, arms control, Central America and the European allies, among others. The need to compromise was symbolized by the resort to bipartisan commissions (the Scowcroft panel on the MX missile, the Kissinger group on Central America) that did extremely useful work and produced sound, generally centrist recommendations, which by no reasonable standard could be described as weak. Despite recent, markedly pacific gestures from...
While it is possible that Updike does not entirely share the Manichean simplicity of this witch's views, he does nothing to counteract the reductionist view of virtue as the lack of strength. The reader feels that Updike's vision although concerned with goodness, does little to characterize just what comprises and defeats...
These policies, of course, result from the heady mixture of myth and fantasy--with but a sprinkling of fact--regarding the Soviet Union that Reagan and his advisors have been sniffing for some time. Yet even if one accepts this naively Manichean world-view, it is increasingly obvious that the great arms grab beg is securing few benefits for the U.S. The $8.5 billion Awacs deal, heralded as the coup that would seal the U.S. Saudi alliance, is already looking like a debacle. Within weeks of the Senate's narrow approval of the sale, members of the Saudi ruling family...
...order." But even a great novelist cannot reduce his life to the same kind of order that he achieves in his fictional characters. This might be the reason for my slight feeling of dissatisfaction with A Sort of Life. All the ingredients of a Greene novel are there: the Manichean universe, the existential hero never quite in control of his life, the grubby side of espionage. But Greene the novelist would never have ignored his hero's wife. He would never have digressed on his hero's relatives, or on the party games the hero played as a child. That...
...England Harvard freak. A freak in J. Press clothing. His likes: dope, cigarettes, dope, "TWA stewies," dope, pubic hair. His dislikes: pigs, his parents, pigs, the mornings before exams, pigs, the Porcellian Club, pigs, pigs. The stoned vs. the straight, the freak vs. the pig-that is his Manichean worldview. And so we follow Peter Harkness from Boston to Berkeley, his suitcase crammed with grass, his mind constantly finding newer and better ways to elude the pigs, beat plastic, uptight America, take the money...