Word: moralisms
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Senate to approve his idea of rebating the bulk of the $40 billion in taxes to the gas and oil industry instead of to consumers--is a story that may never be fully told. The specifics of the horsetrading and collected. IOUs that went into destroying Jimmy Carter's "moral equivalent of war" in the Senate will not leave the cloakroom; Long's means of obtaining Finance Committee jurisdiction for so many important bills remains obscure...
...take over the world, nor, of course, masturbatory fantasies, replete with sadistic fiends and willing damsels-in-distress. Rather, these are stories about men and women struggling to keep their heads above the filth that has become their lives, trying to rationalize the job they must do with a moral code that they have already stretched to the breaking point. For le Carre, those stories come together to create a masterpiece of entertainment. For the reader willing to think about them closely, they may in the end mean much more...
...Blind Date, Kosinski constructs one moral dilemma after another. One particularly gruesome scene depicts Levanter seeking vengeance against a hotel clerk, whose betrayal of one of Levanter's Eastern European friends to the secret police resulted in the brutal crippling of his friend. Levanter lures the clerk to a sauna, knocks him unconscious, then unflinchingly shoves a saber up his rectum. While Kosinski says he himself would not have killed the clerk, making Levanter perform that act confronts the reader with the question: at what moment should life be spared. "The act generates respect for life even though...
Levanter's revenge also prompts the question of how far any individual should go in appointing himself judge, jury and executioner, but Kosinski rejects such complications, calling them "standards of Hollywood movies." He believes that life requires every individual to be both judge and jury, that moral decisions necessitate individual choice. Still, he admits that "only an individual with an enormous respect for life, his own as well as others, can single out truly ethical moral standards...
Unfortunately, in a world as complex and unpredictable as the one Kosinski perceives, one must make judgments without any hope of foreseeing the consequences of the choice. To take a moral stand requires a plunge into the unknown, the acceptance of a "blind date." One must pin the carnation to the lapel, stand by the lamppost and await an indefinite fate, a handsome beauty or a dilapidated reject. To Kosinski's frustration and disappointment, most Americans would rather stay home and watch television than stand on the street corner and wait for the unexpected