Word: nobler
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...sacred document, they would have to make some sense of its "proposition that all men are created equal." He reached into the childhood memories of his audience, to all those Fourth of July orations they had absorbed. He was appealing from one set of prejudices to a nobler set, as a shrewd pol should...
...Washington, prove me wrong! Show that our taxes serve some nobler function than to perpetuate the IRS. I can think of two convincing approaches. One would be to use the 20% of the budget earmarked for defense to cancel the 30% of tax dollars that are earmarked for interest on the federal debt. I am talking about a global strike against the people to whom we owe the debt: Bomb 'em, strafe 'em, plow them under with tanks! If we could fight for oil, or whatever it was, we could surely fire a few rounds to lower the debt...
Racial scapegoating has its charms, I will admit: the surge of righteous anger, even the fun -- for those inclined -- of wearing sheets and burning crosses. But there are better, nobler sources of white pride, it seems to me. Remember, whatever they say about our music or our taste in clothes, only we can truly, deeply blush...
...mainstream movies a generation ago, Sidney Poitier was Hollywood's Martin Luther King Jr. Poitier's screen characters were as noble as any blond hero -- nobler, because they withstood and deflected so much unjustified abuse. But the role of soulful sufferer was a dead end for blacks on both sides of the movie screen. Intransigent white America could not be persuaded to lift blacks to equality. Could the system then be scared into action? The Watts and Newark riots of the mid-'60s may have been mainly fratricidal, and the your-money-or- your-wife taunts of the Black Panthers...
...appear less and less as a charitable institution seeking truth and more and more as a huge commercial operation... the feelings it genders will not be quite the same as those produced by an institution that is prepared to forgo income, if need be, to preserve values of a nobler kind...