Word: primal
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That fear is pretty close to primal. And so, especially if they're American made, the movies have turned to this topic on a regular basis. If an anxiety is common enough, there's usually a dollar or two to be made on it. Parental nerves are currently fueling such straightforward pictures as Man on Fire, a revenge film, and Godsend, in which the spirit of a wicked child haunts the mind of a good one, with risible results. These films move to a standard beat, leaving us wanting to hear the sounds of a different drummer...
...infidels. This is not rocket science. It is conventional wisdom among democracy and human-rights activists-and yet the Administration allowed itself to be blinded by righteousness. Why? Because moral pomposity is almost always a camouflage for baser fears and desires. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the neoconservatives share a primal belief in the use of military power to intimidate enemies. If the U.S. didn't strike back "big time," it would be perceived as weak. (Crushing the peripheral Taliban and staying focused on rooting out al-Qaeda cells wasn't "big" enough.) The President may have had some personal motives...
...begin with, Times Square is not a square. It's actually more of a triangle, one created over the years by the convergence of Broadway, Seventh Avenue and every primal impulse--sex, power, greed, vanity, ambition--known to man. Or woman. Or, in these days of the sanitized 42nd Street, Mickey Mouse...
Despite these liabilities, though, walking yields real pleasure. There’s something primal about it: the extension of the long muscles of your thighs, the swing of your knee’s hinge, the kick at the apex of your stride, the roll of your foot’s fine, differentiated bones against the pavement. Walking allows you to think: Charles Dickens, I read once, often walked 20 miles a day and would come back brimming with new characters, dialogue and melodrama. And Dickens did it in the days before really comfortable footwear. Too, walking provides a friendly view...
...With Primal Scream long established and H Bomb in the works, Harvard’s campus is getting more naked. This is—generally—a positive trend. Yet Monday’s nude protest in the Pit staged by the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) reminded us that just because people are naked doesn’t mean that their cause is worth supporting...