Word: ordeal
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...dramas are curiously ritualistic and similar to one another. A celebrity wanders in the shadow world of Dysfunction: amid drugs or booze or binge eating. Or else in Denial of something, of incest, say, or child abuse, or another shameful secret. This is the Exemplary Ordeal. Celebrity Hits Bottom (descent into underworld). Then stumbles halfway up, to Betty Ford or some equivalent purgatorial rehab. At last, fallen angel reascends to the upper air, finds new life (often new mate as well, or else peace with the truth that, hey, it's O.K. to be alone). The rebirth is celebrated...
...forlorn way, a sort of collective moral life of the nation gets enacted through the ordeal stories. They dramatize the problem. They dramatize the resolution. Here is a sample Rashomon of rape -- Willie Smith's accuser pacing the lawn with Archpriestess Diane. Here is Mike Tyson. Here is life and death itself: poor Michael Landon slowly dying in full view of the congregation of Johnny Carson and PEOPLE...
Arthur Ashe is not Michael Landon. He did not wish to appear in an Exemplary Ordeal. Ashe has AIDS -- a fact that the public knows now because the Press (in this case a reporter and an editor from USA Today) reached into the most private precinct of his life (inside his body itself) and forced him to reveal his disease to millions of strangers. Ashe and his wife Jeanne have a five-year-old daughter. The girl was entitled to privacy and to tenderness in how she would be told, and when...
...time Theresa Ann died of respiratory failure, her organs had deteriorated to the point that they could not be used for transplants. From a medical point of view, her mother's ordeal had been in vain...
...comrade-in-chains Tom Sutherland chose a different path and plunged into a lucrative round of lectures and public appearances. Some psychologists with experience in debriefing former hostages are concerned that Sutherland, who twice attempted suicide while in captivity, has not allowed himself enough time to recover from his ordeal. But the former university professor seems to relish the limelight, particularly the standing ovations...