Word: moralize
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...disproportion between the two subjects is grotesque, almost a joke. To crowd Lewinsky and Rwanda into the same viewfinder is not just to discuss apples and oranges but to compare, forgive me, apples and severed heads. Each of the dramas discloses a nation in moral crisis, but as Bill Clinton might point out, it depends what you mean by "moral." What a difference in the nations--and in the crises...
First, perspective: the moral weight of a national crisis is in inverse proportion to a nation's wealth and power. America in its opulence gets presidential docu-porn--what the Washington lawyer Lloyd Cutler calls "Full Monty impeachment," the risky, tiresome romp of a resourceful President who, caught in violations of the school's honor code, violates it further in protesting his innocence...
...contrast, Rwanda (average monthly income: less than $25) gets rivers clogged with corpses. America's wealth entitles its citizens to work themselves into a moral froth over office fellatio. America's vast First World privilege also means that its scandals are infinitely less dangerous to the man and woman in the street. America's samurai of opinion scream at one another on talk shows; political argument in Rwanda means a million people hacked to pieces by machetes...
...thought of the reporting devoted to the two subjects: Gourevitch's book ranks among the best examples of the journalism of moral witness. It speaks with an austerity enforced by the mystery and horror of the genocide...
...hybrids that came to be called fusion. Known today as smooth jazz, or as "that crap they play when Regis and Kathie Lee go to commercial," fusion continues to thrive; it even has its own Billboard chart. But in more sober musical circles, it is considered a kind of moral stain...