Word: paganization
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Perhaps the best way to explain Antonio Pagan is to remember that it took Richard Nixon to open China. As councilman for Manhattan's Lower East Side, Pagan may be the only elected official in America who is an openly gay Puerto Rican liberal. Yet these days he is best known as the champion of a distinctly unprogressive-sounding cause: an effort to sweep the homeless people from the streets of his district. In 1991 he spearheaded a successful campaign to chase squatters out of Tompkins Square Park. Now he is leading the charge to block radical gay activists from...
...Pagan, who was formerly a not-for-profit developer of housing for the homeless, is unapologetic. "I'm a liberal," he says. "We're not feeling guilty...
Increasingly, liberals like Pagan in big and small cities alike are replacing pity with "pragmatism," as Pagan calls his approach. As they do so, they are riding a wave of resentment building up against America's most disenfranchised population. The sympathy of the 1980s that gave way to compassion fatigue by the turn of the decade is now an open expression of loathing for the homeless. Once romanticized as impoverished casualties of an uncaring society, America's homeless -- who number anywhere from 600,000 to 3 million, depending on whose count you believe -- are now more likely to be demonized...
Tennessee is a variation on Lughnasa's themes: the intertwining of pagan and ) Christian traditions, the virtues and dangers of connecting with one's animal self, loneliness within family and marriage, the paralyzing loss of certainty in the modern world. But in Lughnasa themes emerged organically from storytelling. In Tennessee they are often clumsily declaimed. Moreover, the Dublin-derived ensemble did not create the illusion of long familiarity that the once-in-a-lifetime Lughnasa troupe did. As a bookie who plays sugar daddy to all the other characters, marvelous Donal McCann brought himself to feckless ruin with a crooked...
...Rice ultimately takes on too much in Lasher--the novel is too broad in scope. Rice seeks to link up Celtic pagan myths to Christian ones, secular ideas to religious ones. Several of the disparate strands of the narrative seem intentionally left unresolved to pave the way for a sequel. Throughout the novel one is willing to forgive minor stylistic and narrative gaps, yet the eventual collapse of the historical panorama and Lasher's final confession seem little more than ridiculous. For devotes of the genre Rice offers all the elements which make the erotic/horror/fantasy tale popular--she just fails...