Word: moralizes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...thoughtless Swiss diplomat came to call nothing less than a "war" against his country started with little things. A gold ring. A novel. A chair. Before long, a chain reaction of seemingly disconnected events, an assortment of powerful personalities and a series of Swiss blunders culminated in a moral crusade to track down stolen wealth hidden away inside the vaults of Zurich and restore it to the victims of the Holocaust. The proximate cause was money, but the soul-searing intent of the men and women who set the hunt in motion was to peel back the veil time...
...pressure on them, nothing would have happened," he says flatly. "I think about it. But Jews do not make anti-Semitism. Anti-Semites make anti-Semitism. If we are going to give them an excuse to yell at Jews, O.K. But there is a moral issue here," he says with grave passion, "and the issue is truth...
...range of reactions is interesting. There is the usual rolling of the eyes by the kind of Anti-Semite Lite who regards any mention of the Holocaust ("Not again!") as a bore and a kind of chronic blackmail, a moral collection racket. In an entirely different way, there are also Israelis who object to Holocaust remembering, because they think it a sign of weakness or at least of unproductive obsession. Some Jews who favor pressing the case against Swiss banks recall a bitter joke: in czarist Russia, two Jews are lined up against the wall to be shot; the captain...
Students of my generation were taught that E.M. Forster's Howards End is an important novel because its central dictum, "Only connect," is a prescription for the moral life. It was assumed that making connections was a sign of the mind's worth and purpose. Only connect; things fall apart; these fragments I have shored against my ruins. Perhaps this effort to bridge and yoke was a consequence of the big bad Bomb, and of a world growing up under the persistent threat of disintegration. Perhaps it was simply an invention of the academy in which exam questions insisted...
...case this quality is gently armored by Bridget Fonda's sweetly sexy representation of common American sense and decency. She is supposed to seduce Juvenal on behalf of the siding salesman, but she knows a good man when she sees one, in part because they so rarely traverse the moral flatlands she has been obliged to inhabit. She also knows she had better treasure and protect this one without dithering too long over the matter. Goodness is ever an endangered species--and evil is ever a dangerous...