Word: paradigm
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DISNEY IS NOT a paradigm of cool. Not that nature movies generally are, but most viewers will without a doubt recall with a wince those semi-documentaries which manage to cram the grand expanses of nature into the vacuum tube confines of the American psyche with a liberal lubricaiton of cuteness. You know, the bear cubs clumsily gamboling about, choreographed to silly bassoon music and chortling narration ("Well, I guess our little friends got more than they bargained for when they tried to get into that beehive...
...purely unemotional, pragmatic level, this Administration's policy toward the Caribbean Basin in general and Grenada in particular has been a paradigm of idiocy. Before the coup in Grenada two weeks ago, the island was already ruled by a Marxist, Prime Minister Maurice Bishop. Although Bishop was hardly a proponent of American-style capitalism-perhaps with reason, given widespread rumors of a CIA-backed coup to depose him several years ago-he nonetheless realized it was in his country's interest to have cordial relations with the United States. To that end, he travelled to Washington last spring, only...
...having his own family. Affairs of business (the board of directors wants a new chairman) drive him away again, and in that journey his family is torn asunder, eclipsed, distanced from each other, only to come together years later after great hardship and anguish. The story provides a paradigm of family traumas: striking out alone, marriage, divorce, filial differences or just plain lack of time for each other. But ultimately, Pericles celebrates the nuclear family which endures and reunites against all odds and society's evils. All will live happily until the cycle of life starts agains with new children...
...with an old pal, croaks a song or two and returns without warning to the attic of reverie. Look behind the electrified hair and the cunningly garbled consonants of Murphy's Buckwheat, a resurrection of the character from the Our Gang comedies, and you will find a showbiz paradigm: the exploitation of a smile and a conspicuous lack of talent into big bucks. Whites are not immune either. He can metamorphose into Gumby, the '50s cartoon character who has somehow aged into a carping Catskills comic; or a late-show pitchman, peddling Galactic Prophylactics and the Funeral...
...struggled barely alive out of a raging torrent and does not enter the water again. No, I think as I look down on this place that is so small, so diminished, so unspecial, this is not Antioch: Antioch was days and nights of vivid action, Antioch was a paradigm of history on which at one time and another every kind of thinker and doer, every kind of greatness and smallness jostled together and shouldered and elbowed their way through all the lights and resonances and colors, all the smells and flavors and motion of endless variations of circumstance and event...