Word: mythicize
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...great Southern historian C. Vann Woodward began his seminal essay on "The Search for Southern Identity" in 1958. Woodward then and now answers his own question with a qualified, though brilliantly emphatic, yes. I can't and don't. The South as South, a living, ever regenerating mythic land of distinctive personality, is no more. At most, it is an artifact lovingly preserved in the museums of culture and the shops of tourist commerce precisely because it is so hard to find in the vital centers of the region's daily life...
That opening confrontation is not only dramatic but also, by erstwhile Soviet standards, outright dangerous. It portrays Lenin as a fallible man, not a mythic hero. It admits that the Bolsheviks were detested by many of the peasants they purported to help. And the play commits the once unpardonable sin of bringing Trotsky onstage -- showing him, in fact, as shrewder than Lenin. The theme is ideological purity vs. practical necessity, with pragmatism favored all the way. Compromise with the West is extolled as sensible; worldwide revolution is dismissed as a daydream...
...badge of honor. Yet when a burned- out Noonan left the White House in 1986, her nemesis, chief of staff Don Regan, denied her the courtesy of a farewell chat with the President. As the real Reagan kept drifting beyond her grasp, Noonan found solace in the mythic President whom she likened to "a gigantic heroic balloon floating in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade...
...those astonishing ironies of history, many have invested their hopes in Nelson Mandela, the aged black revolutionary now endowed with almost mythic stature. Imprisoned for life for sedition, unseen and largely unheard from for more than 27 years, he is somehow expected to lead South Africa to salvation. But can any man perform that miracle? Is South Africa really ready to be led out of the wilderness of apartheid into the promised land of . . . of what? The black dream of a nonracial democratic society -- in short, black rule? Or something less, a revision of the old system in which white...
JUAN DARIEN. A puppet musical? For adults? Unimaginable, perhaps -- but also spellbinding, in this richly mythic off-Broadway delight...