Word: mythic
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Americans every four years have to talk themselves into something. They need to see a kind of plausibility in a candidate. The Nobel Prize committees go through the same exercise: the candidates have to be elevated to the general vicinity of the mythic in order to be worthy. But it may be a law of the drama that the presidential choices almost always seem inadequate. People feel an underlying anxiety, not necessarily because the candidates are no good, but because at a moment of such change, an entire society is suspended, awaiting the next...
...prize in this mythic Southern battle--a whopping 2000 plus delegates and a chance to lock up the Democratic and Republican nominations. And beyond that a chance for the South to rise again. Said to say, none of this will happen...
...this secretive, brooding man is also spoken of as a hero and immortal because, some say, he carries 50 bullets in his body. Who fired them is not clear. More apparent is the author's intention to give a mythic nudge to a character whose life seems mundane and wearisome...
...poor, the homeless, the aged, the ill. We are at a point in this country where all the visions, liberal and conservative, have come and gone, and we are left standing among the quite specific and various problems that those visions either created or failed to address. No new mythic dream will clean up the mess, and no one really knows what to do about much of it. Yet we are still part of the original 200-year-old vision that saw America as a power wanting to be as good as it is great. The candidate who knows that...
Some of the events of the year -- the starvation in Biafra, for example, or the seizure of the American intelligence ship Pueblo -- might have occurred in some other year. The events were significant but not central to the drama. For the essential 1968 was mythic. It proceeded chaotically and yet finally had the coherence and force of tragedy. And if it was the end of some things (of the civil rights movement, of Lyndon Johnson's generous social vision, of the liberals' hope to keep government on its trajectory), it prepared the way for other beginnings: the women's movement...