Word: overdogs
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...have long helped sway opinion: the summary execution of a Viet Cong by a South Vietnamese police chief defined that war's casual cruelty. But victim photographs have usually better served the outgunned, like Iraqis leading media tours of purportedly civilian sites bombed during the Gulf War. For the overdog, the device risks showing weakness: pictures of American POWs in Vietnam undermined rather than galvanized support at home. But the Israelis, who in the first intifadeh suffered the ill p.r. effects of pictures of their soldiers firing on rock-throwing protesters, have learned that a measured message of victimhood...
...films (the five major ones are the '40s visits to Singapore, Zanzibar, Morocco, Utopia - Alaska - and Rio) were screwy, all right, but pretty shrewd as character comedy of a high, broad stripe. With the help of their writers, Crosby and Hope perfected two hardy comic types: Bing the lordly overdog, smart and charming enough to get other folks to volunteer for the sucker's game; and Bob the scruffy underdog, too used to losing, too stubborn to give up. Bing was Bugs to Bob's Daffy; Dean Martin to his Jerry; Bill Murray to Hope's Martin Short...
...fresh from rehab. Eddie was once again cute, dazzling, working overtime to please. Relocating his strength as a mimic, he played seven characters, all brilliantly. The one unattractive figure, Buddy Love, was a wicked stretch of the Eddie Murphy personality that moviegoers had tired of: sleek, preening, abrasive, an overdog in love with itself. The other characters were marvels not just of makeup but also of comic sympathy; Sherman Klump and his pudgy, putrefactive family had humor and heart. The $130 million box-office take showed how much affection filmgoers still had for Murphy. They hoped it heralded...
...back to the '50s, to the culture war of the cold war, with that sissy Adlai Stevenson orating in flickering grays on the Philco. Gonzaga did not make Buchanan a demagogue, but something in the school's inherent anger long ago and its bullying, underdog-wants-to-be-overdog righteousness went into Pat's brain, and came out nasty and dangerous...
Above all, there is the damage to the country's self-image. One of the most persistent and persuasive observations by Viet Nam commentators has been that the war, and the revelations of My Lai, the perversity of the overdog, the abuses of power, conspired to destroy not only the sense of America's omnipotence but the sense of American guilelessness as well. And yet, how true will that prove...