Word: panglossians
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There is a certain Panglossian spirit, sweet and fatuous, always at play in the margins of any discussion of forgiveness. Comedian Richard Pryor, in one of his routines, describes how he went to Arizona State Prison in order to make a 1980 movie called Stir Crazy. Before that experience, he said, he had recited a standard liberal line about the injustice of prisons. But after he met some of the homicidal brutes there and found out what crimes they had committed to earn their tuition, he said he was glad they had prisons with great big bars to hold people...
...Americans by and large feel worse off today than they did a year ago. Nor will Kahn's profile win awards for methodology. Not one of the dozen or so "typical" Americans was quoted, say, while shuffling along an unemployment line. And some readers may quarrel with the Panglossian assessment of the California raisin farmer who beams: "We're bound to end up way ahead of where we were before...
These soaring prospects fill many Westerners with a Panglossian sense that the boom provides the best of all possible worlds. "It's great," says Charles Page of Colorado's Gunnison County Chamber of Commerce about a planned molybdenum mine. "It will diversify the economy and give jobs to people who really want to work." But this same growth begets among other Westerners a fear that they may be witnessing not only the ravaging of their landscapes but also the destruction of values that they cherish: the unhurried pace of traditional Western life, the neighborly feeling of the small...
Purists of the Olympics argue a bit romantically that the Games must be above politics, that regimes and secular squabbles come and go, that political issues are always transient, that the Olympic spirit is transcendent. That is what Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the Panglossian founder of the modern Olympics intended. During the twelve centuries of the ancient Games, warring states and tribes suspended their homicidal business every four years and flocked to the sweet valley beyond Mount Kromion to compete for crowns of wild olive. Now, some athletes complain, a reverse logic applies; the Games get suspended at the first...
British Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey possesses a splendid-some think notorious-gift for Panglossian rhetoric in the face of economic distress. Last week he held forth with customary ebullience on Britain's economic prospects. But this time his optimism was well grounded. In addresses to Common Market finance ministers in Brussels, the Chancellor detailed evidence of solid performance...