Word: moralizes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Whether by refusing to admit a boat carrying helpless Jewish refugees into an American harbor, or by opting not to bomb the railroad tracks to the death camps, the United States government fell far short of moral perfection in its policy towards the Holocaust...
This week, an extensive show at the Air and Space Museum commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the American bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was dramatically scaled down. Some eighty members of congress, together with the American Legion and other veterans' groups, attacked the exhibit, which explored the moral ambiguities of the atomic bombing of two major Japanese urban areas...
...certainly not going to change if people don't stand up to it," Hyland says of the military's policy on gays. "Especially in universities, which have become, in a certain way, the holders of the moral conscience of the country...
Both women were fairly daring for their day. McCarthy's autobiographical fiction (The Company She Keeps, The Group) was sexually brisk and unromantic. It is where many readers first encountered a young woman seduced by an attractive stranger without suffering any ill effect. At a time when the heavy moral lifting was thought best left to men, Arendt bench-pressed the weight of the world in books with such grave titles as The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition and The Life of the Mind. Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) gave the world a deeply disturbing concept, "the banality of evil...
...Dearest Mary," she writes in 1964, "the chief vice of every egalitarian society is Envy ... This constant comparing is really the quintessence of vulgarity." This fact does not stop the two pen pals from making comparisons. Yet the assessments share an ideal of high-mindedness, of scaling some moral peak that towers over fallible theories and suspect ideologies. Parts of letters read like encounters in The Magic Mountain and offer clues to the thematic overload in McCarthy's last novels. Happily, most of the exchanges have the vitality and cutting edge of her earlier fiction...