Word: mythic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Mens sana in corpore sano--a sound mind, a sound body--once formed the simple ancient virtue of sport. But in time too much of athletic competition has come to be writ in mythic proportions. Sports heroes loom larger than life. A sense of god-like immortality accompanies the "thrill" of victory. The divide between life's reality and the fantasy of Elysian fields is being trampled by the universalized pursuit of fame and glory through athletics...
...widely divergent events as the Oklahoma City bombing and Ross Perot's recent proposal to launch a new political party. Nye's particular brand of rebellion is driven too by an intense feeling that the combined forces of federal law, environmental activism and urban growth may have doomed a mythic frontier life-style. Says Karl Hess Jr., a senior fellow of the Cato Institute, a conservative think tank: "What they really want is to build walls against the future...
Certainly, her mythic place in American history would seem to make her an unlikely anti-abortion crusader. At the same time, she was never a poster child for the abortion movement. In fact, her participation in the case was not brought on by her commitment to social change, but more buy the fact that she happened to be in the right place at the right time...
Dramatic it almost is. Having decided that the title character was too big for the stage, Britten and Auden reduced the mythic giant logger to a booming invisible voice, sounding like a cross between Walter Cronkite and Big Brother, that directs the taming of the wilderness. His minions include a creatively frustrated egghead, a hot-tempered muscleman, a pair of winsome young lovers and all manner of ax-swinging loggers and their "wimmin." Inexplicably absent is Babe the Blue...
There will always be something mythic about the travails and rescue of Scott O'Grady in Bosnia, but the facts emerging concern the explanations for how he came to be shot down, and they tend to be less uplifting. As the accompanying story reports, Slobodan Milosevic claims to have tried to help make sure O'Grady was returned alive. Pentagon officials assert something quite different: that were it not for Milosevic, no missile would have destroyed O'Grady's F-16 in the first place...