Word: primal
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...years ago, he could be remarkably opaque. Ways of Worldly Wisdom, 1976-77, attempts to create a whole genealogy of German nationalism starting with Arminius, who in A.D. 9 wrecked Augustus Caesar's policy of German occupation by destroying three Roman legions in the Teutoburg Forest. As a primal hero of German history, Arminius was a great Nazi favorite, but here Kiefer conflates him with awkward portraits of all manner of later German "descendants" like Blucher, who fought against Napoleon; Schlieffen, whose strategy for the westward conquest of Europe was the basis of Hitler's blitzkrieg; writers from Klopstock...
Nowadays too many people are saying that college students are apathetic, that they are interested only in selfish self-indulgent pursuits and have no cause to struggle for. But once we recognize that the satisfaction of our primal urges is our primary responsibility to society, I say that we will have a cause to struggle for--the liberation of our society from its patriarchal, heterocentric, food-ist, fecaphobic capitalism...
...Here's a letter from your daughter; she's engaged and she's bringing her fiance home so we can meet him"? "He didn't say the whole fraternity; just the guys from his floor, and it's only for a weekend"? Strong candidates. But for terror at its primal level, there is nothing quite like "There's a blizzard in Chicago; they've just closed O'Hare...
Dating, or even tiptoeing outside the cathedral of wedlock for a weekend tryst, isn't supposed to be deadly either. But drama is often the imagination of disaster, and horror is the escalation of primal anxieties (pregnancy, puberty, even dentistry) into touchstone fantasies (Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, Marathon Man). Says Fatal Attraction's screenwriter James Dearden: "I wanted to take every situation to the worst-possible-case scenario and see what happened...
...nation is famously lucky. Its primal luck was geography and timing: a wild natural abundance that was encountered by gifted men and women in the clear rational blue of the Enlightenment. The Constitution was drafted in a moment of ascendant science -- political science preached by Locke and Montesquieu, for example -- and belief in the power of reason to subdue the savage and ignorant regions of the mind...