Word: moralizes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...dynamic is almost always the same. In the 1940s Harry Truman, a hero President in today's myth, came onstage as a moral-cultural-intellectual nonentity, the strutty little haberdasher of Independence, Missouri, ridiculously trying to fill the shoes of Franklin Roosevelt, who was of course by that time...
Anyone past adolescence knows what moral to draw from the Scarlett and Ashley Wilkes story: Keep your dreams if you like (though Ashley may turn out to be to be a jerk when deprived of his chivalric mystique), but work with what you have--which Scarlett, God knows, did. Americans get the Presidents they exert themselves to deserve. That may or may not be a good thing; it is a mistake to get prissy about it. Selflessness shades into self-righteousness. If Presidents are chosen by the exertions of selfless zealots, the process may prove dangerously unrepresentative...
There is a deeper moral embedded in Colin Powell's decision. It has to do with the sight, unexpected in politics, of a sane man being true to himself--unaffectedly displaying an integrity that has a faraway feel, like Frank Capra movies from the '30s. In the '90s politics and entertainment have completed a merger through media--an unwholesome synthesis that produces a whole circus of falsifications and unrealities, a kind of drug dream. The drug is power, that stimulant and hallucinogen. Even with the highest office in the world apparently available to him ("The first black ."), Powell remained comfortably...
...voted 231 to 201 last month to cut Medicare by $270 billion, because, as Republican Porter J. Goss of Florida put it, "We want to save Medicare." Despite the Congressman's words, the House's vote was a vote against the American poor. Without programs such as Medicare, poverty--moral and economic--is all America can expect...
...home. However, the actual story is not as coherent as it should be. The frequent discussion of Nundo, an old revolutionary friend of Vicente, seems puzzling since no one explains who he is. When the audience finally sees him, Nundo abandons Vicente in a huge tizzy over the moral dilemma of his country's political health. His position is never resolved...