Word: nationals
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...cost of constant excitement, of a persistent and violent rearrangement of one's sense of order, results in surfeit. The mind is overcome by a kind of compassion fatigue. The events of the '60s have profoundly disturbed the American sense of reality. The longest war in the nation's history, with the American combat dead and wounded last week passing 300,000, seems at once horribly strange and grimly familiar. All too accustomed to daily deaths in Viet Nam, Americans needed time to grasp the fact that these particular deaths, caused by these particular young Americans, represented...
America's Puritan sense tends to regard evil in stark terms of black and white. It has been pointed out endlessly, and correctly, that the western, with its crude division of good guys and bad guys, is the nation's archetypal art form. Evil has thus been transmogrified, whenever possible, into the definable, detestable enemy-like Hitler, say-who could always be defeated by the forces of justice. The national instinct to juxtapose good and evil is summed up with only a touch of irony by W. H. Auden's nostalgic reference to simpler times...
...Americans that they see themselves as potential saints more than as real-life sinners. Seen in the transfiguring mirror of patriotism, the history of America is a record of triumph over adversity, moral earnestness and accomplishment. America's libertarian achievements and idealism certainly justify great pride; and the nation's technological record in taming nature is one of the world's wonders. But Americans have insufficiently considered the possibility that this record is also tarred with betrayals of the nation's democratic ideals, and that no nation has a solitary, superior claim to virtue...
...Traditionally, evil has been something distant, Wholly Other, rather than an enemy within. When Rap Brown complained that "violence is as American as cherry pie," most Americans dismissed the charge as the aberrant nastiness of a Black Power fanatic. When the Kerner Commission proposed that America was a racist nation, the U.S. public reacted with "Who, me?" protests of innocence. But there is a dark underside to American history: the despoliation of the Indian, the subjection of the black, the unwise and probably unmoral insistence on the enemy's unconditional surrender that led to Hiroshima...
According to Christian moral theology, the self-awareness of sin and guilt is a necessary prologue to sanctity; in the prism of psychoanalysis, self-discovery is seen as the first step toward sanity. Individuals are not identical with nations, but sometimes they are analogous. And thus it can be argued that only the nation that has faced up to its own failings and acknowledged its capacities for evil and ill-doing has any real claim to greatness...