Word: paragone
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True feminist points, though, might go to Otherwise Engaged, which, while no paragon of craftsmanship, takes on the subject of female commitment fear, not a topic feverishly discussed in McCall's. The novel deconstructs a year in the life of Eve, a successful ad executive, as she prepares to marry at 36. She has dated her beau for four years. All along she has thought happiness would come in a ring box, but once Eve gets her gem, all she can do is panic over the foreverness of it all--aren't all married people miserable? It is comforting...
...temporary paralysis. Moses is a universal symbol of liberation, law and leadership, sculpted by Michelangelo, painted by Rembrandt, eulogized by Elie Wiesel as "the most solitary and most powerful hero in biblical history...After him, nothing else was the same again." Even baseball managers grow eloquent about Moses as paragon: when recounting why Mets star Bobby Bonilla failed to inspire his teammates during his first stint with the team in the early 1990s, Frank Cashen explained, "He was supposed to lead us out of the wilderness, take us to the Red Sea and part the waters. It didn't work...
...like Jackie Robinson than Michael Jordan. When he broke baseball's color line in 1947, Robinson set the superhuman standard of conduct for such racial pioneers. He knew that to be considered a success by prejudiced whites, he had to be not only a superstar player but also a paragon of moral behavior. For his first few seasons, he left his combative temper in the locker room, suffered insults without fighting back and played his heart out on the field. He refused to give his opponents a weapon they could use against him, and in the end, earned universal...
...give director Edward Zwick and his fellow screenwriters, Lawrence Wright and Menno Meyjes, credit for complicating their material, and therefore our responses to it, in ways that go well beyond the demands of the genre. They give us an FBI agent in charge of the case--played by that paragon of sexy stalwartness, Denzel Washington--whose heroism lies largely in his ability to reconsider hasty conclusions. They provide him with an assistant of Arab descent (a quietly smoldering Tony Shalhoub), caught in a conflict between duty and disgust when the soldiery snatches his son because he happens to match...
...nearly an old leftist, certainly no paragon of virtue, to stand in judgement of anybody else? Involvement in history and retreat from engagement make us accomplices. And yet, the ideas of the neo-Conmen are so smugly, so self-righteously and militantly stated, their entire stance is so triumphalist, that little fellow-felling with these people is possible. They do not seem to acknowledge their human frailty or fallibility. They are not making Americans more cozily familial or deeply religious or keenly responsive to the needs and obligations of society. They led to a fence outside Laramie--and then, what...