Word: naif
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Like Ruth, Sling Blade's Karl Childers (Billy Bob Thornton) is a brain-damaged naif taken in by strangers. When he was 12, Karl killed his mother and her lover. Now, 25 years later, he is released from a mental hospital and befriended by a boy (Lucas Black) who could be a healthier version of the lonely, imperiled child Karl was and still is. Rural Arkansas is home to some very decent people--the boy Frank, his mother and her boss (Ritter), Karl and his various keepers--and one or two moral skunks, notably the loutish boyfriend (Dwight Yoakam...
Soft. That word may be the root of Shimon Peres' galling defeat. Many voters mistrusted his New Middle East as just the feel-good visions of a naif. His attempt to buttress his security credentials by ordering a callous 17-day bombardment of Lebanon that killed as many as 200 civilians alienated many more Israeli-Arab voters than it earned him Jewish ones. Leah Rabin, wife of the Prime Minister slain by a right-wing extremist last November, criticized Peres' high-minded refusal to exploit the assassination for electoral advantage. He never responded in kind to Likud's pointed, simplistic...
During Fahd's 14-year reign, he and his full brothers, called the "Sudairi Seven" after their mother, acquired enormous power within the ruling family. Prince Sultan and Prince Naif, for example, head up the Ministries of Defense and Interior. Before they allow Fahd to pass from the scene, these men want their privileges assured. In particular, Sultan wants Abdullah to designate him the next heir apparent, his right by tradition. Says a source: "The Fahd faction is saying, 'O.K., he goes, but not until our positions are safe and secure.'" Thus Fahd's departure will be a sign that...
...show of Stettheimer's paintings at New York City's Whitney Museum of American Art, titled "Manhattan Fantastica," is a fairly irresistible event. You would need to be a bear not to enjoy its charm, its faux-naif artifice, its overwhelming campiness and its evocation of a period in the history of the American art world be tween the wars that now, at the sour close of the 20th century, seems remote and glittering, like something enclosed in a bell jar. This was the moment when New York, pupating into a modernist capital, contained all the other buzz-word News...
Much of the fault of The Language of Life lies with Moyers' decision to "go soft"--to play the genial, wide-eyed interviewer who encounters a revelation at every turn. He's fond of faux-naif questions (at least one hopes the faux is genuine) such as, "So politics is not only a matter of revolution?" or "Mysticism wasn't meant to be public, was it?" The result is a series of earnest one-on-one interviews that promote just those traits the contemporary poetry scene least needs to encourage: its solemn exhibitionism, its squishy mysticism, its self-absorption...