Word: pessimists
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...penetrating gazes take the place of explosive technical virtuosity. It is caviar to the Hollywood popcorn, and for 40 years ROBERT BRESSON was its finest and most influential purveyor. In 13 features from Les Anges du Peche (1943) to L'Argent (1983), the Frenchman who called himself a "jolly pessimist" went his own thorny way and, through his severe, seductive example, established the dominant style of a minority art form. His films, with little dialogue and music, are in effect silent pictures; they are certainly moving pictures, for they tell stories of people drawn toward death or transfiguration. Bresson...
Even a hard-core pessimist must agree that things are looking up when the most immediate worry at the end of the 20th century is that computers won't know what time it is just after midnight, Dec. 31. Or that the threat of a genuine apocalypse has been downgraded from a swift nuclear winter to the palmy dangers of slow global warming...
...grim subject of networked surveillance, maybe Orwell was just a big, mean, bring-down pessimist. On the other hand, we haven't yet seen an Internet society in the grip of a genocidal land war. Security videocams are already ubiquitous; they've become too commonplace for fiction to notice...
...pessimist to the end, Malthus neglected human ingenuity ? crop rotation and refrigerated steamships got us out of the hole well before his starvation deadline. At least Hinrichsen's doomsaying is more cautious: Technological advances could feed an extra 2 billion mouths, he admits, but would require "decades of effort at the international, national and local levels...
...matter what the pundits, politicians and experts say, everyone is only guessing about how this bold experiment will fare. All the opinions boil down to basic attitudes: you're either an optimist or a pessimist. Optimists start from the premise that it is so much in Beijing's interest to make Hong Kong work that it is bound to keep its promises. As Frank Ching, senior editor and columnist for the Far Eastern Economic Review, writes, "China did not spend two years negotiating the Joint Declaration, five years drafting the Basic Law...with the idea that it would tear them...