Word: peasant
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...helping to drive the Nazis from the Soviet Union. The singer's play tells about the tribulations of Grusha, a girl who in the old days when Kazbek princes ruled Georgia took pity on a governor's son during a palace revolution; and about the trials of Azdak, a peasant who during the revolt managed to make himself a judge, and used the lawbooks for sitting on, turning them against the rich folks who'd written them...
...seems to seek it explicitly--in a stylized slapstick quarrel between the governor's son's two frightened doctors, for example. But just as effectively, most of the time she lets it grow naturally out of the comedy of the play--in Grusha's marriage with a purportedly dying peasant, for instance, where the musicians have to play "something that could be either a subdued Wedding March or a spirited Funeral Dirge." Rosenwald even makes Grusha's flight on a rotting bridge spanning a 2000-foot abyss convincing, with a little help from Susanne Boyce, who did the props...
...peasants received their just reward from the revolution they had sparked. The reforma agraria, or land reform, distributed among the peasants the land they had already seized from the huge plantations in the countryside. The former peons became small landholders, each with his own individual tract. And, with their new economic position, the peasants experienced a rise in social status. No longer were they to be called indios, or Indians, a term Europeans had used to stigmatize them as inferior beings. From now on they were to be called campesinos, a word whose literal definition--"peasant"--conveys nothing...
Some of Confucius's sayings are even potentially revolutionary--"You may rob the Three Armies of their commander-in-chief, but you cannot deprive the humblest peasant of his opinion...
...Confucius was The Master, after all, and his sayings reflect disdain for both the humble peasant and his opinion. "You must practice the manner of gentlemen, not that of the common people," he told one student. "The gentleman is dignified, but never haughty; common people are haughty, but never dignified." As for his Way, The Master said, "The common people can be made to follow it; they cannot be made to understand...