Word: morale
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Byrd Jr., to a pickup truck last year and dragged him along a rough country road that skinned him alive and dismembered him. To object to putting King to death for the deed requires a saintliness I do not possess. In one sense, King's case is almost a moral free ride. My conscience would remain untroubled by some other death sentences, but John William King's execution will seem especially just and fitting--and, though it is ghastly to say so, a rather handsome, pivotal American moment...
...social contract restrains man's impulse toward rough justice. The contract states: Our authorities, acting under law for the community, will find the killers, try them and punish them. Implicit is the promise that the punishment will be sufficient to satisfy the need not only for moral satisfaction and justice but also for some measure of emotional satisfaction, a catharsis by--to admit it--legally ritualized revenge. A public hanging used to be a celebration of justice. The catharsis may have barbaric roots, yet by paradox is an essential civilizing instrument...
...what it likes to call "underlying material," a lode of legend, conveniently located in the public domain, from which it can quarry inspirational tales of resistance to tyranny, redemption from injustice. From The Life of Emile Zola to Braveheart, audiences bedeviled by the ambiguities of modern life have derived moral instruction and emotional uplift from these transformations of the complex past into simple, glowing metaphorical guides to right behavior...
Weyrich, who says he was the one who invented the phrase moral majority, has concluded from the recent unpleasantness that people who believe what he believes are no longer in the majority, and that their only choice is to drop out of a culture that has become an "ever wider sewer...
...Moral Majority was never a majority. A majority of Americans are unwilling to have Paul Weyrich or anybody else dictate to them what is moral and righteous in personal life. In 1992, when the morals police and gay bashers seemed in ascendancy at the Republican National Convention, the public response was so negative that George Bush had to spend the first couple of weeks of the campaign backpedaling...