Word: panglossian
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...fable of emergence and transcendence. Written by William Nicholson and Mark Handley, from Handley's play Idioglossia, it illustrates the familiar movie moral that wounded creatures are powerful ones, with powerful lessons to teach those who would presume to educate them. It's humanism at its most Panglossian. But Michael Apted, who has directed vigorous woodland women before (Sissy Spacek in Coal Miner's Daughter, Weaver in Gorillas in the Mist), focuses on the weird wonder of Foster. Of course her portrayal is a stunt; of course the viewer is aware of the distance between the actress and her role...
Crime is the one arena where prime time drops its Panglossian pose to pander to public hysteria. This is not to argue that the narcotics squad on Nasty Boys should instead pursue jaywalkers or that the cops on Hunter should stop shouting, "Freeze. Police. Drop the gun!" O.K., so you cannot have detective shows without serious crime. But why are sitcoms also menaced by a crime wave that resembles New York City during a blackout? In this single week, there was an interracial team of angry drug dealers on A Different World, a psychotic killer rudely intruding on an office...
...Rose Garden last Friday morning to announce that they had hammered out the 1990 budget concordat. Now, in updated fashion, Rose Garden rubbish can also be defined as "the unveiling of a cynical, bipartisan arrangement to avoid difficult decisions on the deficit through the use of artful arithmetic, Panglossian projections and other green-eyeshade gimmickry...
While there is no nation so blessed as ours, with a natural temperament and natural resources conducive to success, Reagan's vision of a future in which all Americans have a chance to achieve the proverbial American Dream is flawed and Panglossian. His message seems not to be that we should create this bright future, but that it will create itself if we don't interfere...
...that the implication of what he, and for that matter Governor Dukakis, is more or less saying is that we're not going to take any of the painful steps to reduce our deficits and reduce our debt, and that you cannot continue to rely on Panglossian projections, as we've been doing now since...