Word: paragons
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...sublimity. There is, for example, no explanation of why the evil Queen of the Night has at her disposal three virtuous wonder-boys who help Tamino thwart the Queen’s plans after leading him to Sarastro’s temple. Nor is it obvious why Sarastro, that paragon of priestly piety, employs as his prison warden an old lecher bent on ravishing Pamina...
...daughter dating a black man either, nor is she comfortable saying how she does feel. She tells Tony not to "make things worse. Keep playing the race card and you'll drive her right into his arms." (Likewise, Noah, who by the TV race-drama playbook would be a paragon of civility, is a pretentious ass.) There's no easy refuge for the viewer. It's not nice, it's not comforting, but it involves you powerfully...
...virtues, his "openness" and his "honesty," his recoil from the cult of "heroic" personality and his generous encouragement of a score of his contemporaries, from the sculptor Eva Hesse to the critic Lucy Lippard. Selfless, sober, rational, public spirited--what, one is frivolously tempted to wonder, is such a paragon doing in the Whitney, an institution more noted in the '90s for staging tributes to delinquent cult figures like the late Robert Mapplethorpe and the equally late and even more overpraised Jean-Michel Basquiat? Not even the most obsessed Christian Fundamentalist could find much to burn in LeWitt, except...
...Ashcroft hearings also have been about this nexus between private behavior and public virtue. No one is claiming that Ashcroft himself is anything but a paragon of virtue in his private life. Judge Ronnie White, the black jurist blocked by Ashcroft from ascending the judicial ladder, says that he does not believe the man is a racist. But at some level, what irks Ashcroft's critics is that there is some discrepancy between his private virtue and his public life. He preaches tolerance in private but may not practice it in public. He preaches love of his fellow...
...little old-fashioned. I think there ought to be some congruence between one's public life and one's private life. Obviously, the ideal would be if a president were a paragon of virtue in public and in private. (See George Washington as the prototype.) I also believe that one's private conduct is a useful and important measure of one's public character. Washington would have agreed. I suspect he would have regarded Clinton's lack of control in private as an ominous indicator for his public behavior as president...