Word: ought
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...ought to have been evident that something very strange was going on when a middle-aged man interviewed on the morning of Princess Diana's funeral told a TV reporter that he had not wept at his own father's death, but he was weeping today. Say what? But this is the way the whole year of 1997 has gone. Every few weeks in the past 12 months, something happened to invite an emotional public reaction of mass grief, panic or elation, often wildly disproportional to the significance of the event. Most of these eruptions had little staying power...
...will be normalized and neutralized on television. The too frequent child murders of the year, such as the killings in New Jersey (one by another child), the killings and shootings of and by schoolchildren in Mississippi and Kentucky, and the stories of newborns left in toilets or in Dumpsters ought to have aroused great public feelings of pity or rage. But they were defused at the outset by the fact that one knew they would be analyzed into the ground on TV. Everyone in America is on television. A child is killed, and moments later a distraught relative appears...
...more important stories to cover, said the press (as if that had not been the case during Iran-contra and the savings-and-loan frauds, when no princess had died). Behind all that was the embarrassing feeling that journalism had been swept up in a popular moment that it ought to have dissected or belittled, and so then it did, in an effort to cleanse itself of having dealt with the sort of news that makes reporters squirm--the news of feeling. Yet this is what the response to Diana's death was, and it might have been wiser...
Stories that make the times we live in sound like the ancien regime or the final days of Rome ought to be told gradually. Otherwise, people panic. They begin to think they can hear Madame Defarge's knitting needles clicking as head after head tumbles into the basket below the guillotine. So, writing from Manhattan, I'm going to begin by telling you folks in the rest of the country simply that, according to a story in the New York Times by Monique P. Yazigi, apartments in so-called A+ buildings on Fifth Avenue are now selling for what real...
...when Brosnan signed on as Bond three years ago, he didn't have the clout to make such demands. According to his spokesman, Dick Guttman, "[Brosnan] has a classical actor's training from London, and there's not a class in endorsements or implied endorsements." Perhaps there ought to be, or maybe Brosnan should take some lessons from his fellow thespians...