Word: mythicize
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...CALL: RED MOON (MCA). Mystical, mythic rock that stakes a strong claim in territory explored by the likes of the Band and Van Morrison. Wildly ambitious, the Call keeps well away from pretension with the unassuming vigor of its homespun rhythms...
Pick an Elvis, any Elvis at all. There's the mythic bad boy mimed, most recently, by Nicolas Cage in Wild at Heart. There is the great white whale with the red neck harpooned by Albert Goldman in his notorious unauthorized biography. Or there is the sweet prince of dreams, who provides the sound track for the heroine's housework in Alice Hoffman's recent Seventh Heaven...
...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...