Word: psychodramas
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Like Booth and unlike most assassins elsewhere in the world, Americans who try to kill the famous are engaged primarily in psychodrama rather than political drama. They do not seem to care much whether their victim belongs to the left or the right. Arthur Bremer, who crippled George Wallace, thought first of killing George McGovern. Lee Harvey Oswald apparently shot at General Edwin Walker, a right-wing fanatic, before killing President Kennedy. Giuseppe Zangara, who took aim at President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 (accidentally killing the mayor of Chicago), said that he would just as soon have killed...
...forward, accompanied by a giddy, carnival-like ragtime score; we don't have time to puzzle the enigmas that teem in such overabundance, but at the same time we never have time to pin down the petty annoyances. Rush's eclectic style can careen between screwball frolic and murky psychodrama with the naive self-assurance of a precocious school boy. Like his stunt man protagonist, he stumbles again and again; but each time he falls flat he bounces up grinning to rush off for more...
...backdrop of this psychodrama is irresistible to stay-at-homes. A bald eagle nests on the island; wolves come close enough to the house to be easily seen in the moonlight. Though she went off looking for permanence, Arthur discovers that she is a connoisseur of flux. The lake evokes her keenest descriptions: during a storm "the water was stirred every few minutes by a gigantic sweep like the slap of a hand." On a sunny day "the lake is ocean blue, throwing back the face of the sky and then catching it again...
Miller was 14 in 1929, so those years up to Franklin D. Roosevelt's first Inaugural ("The only thing we have to fear is fear itself) form a personal psychodrama for him. He speaks with the authenticity of a war correspondent who saw men fall and whose vision was permanently altered by the experience. Calling the play "a mural for the theater inspired by Studs Terkel's Hard Times," Miller provides panoramic vignettes of just about everything one has read or heard of the period. The seemingly invincible princes of Wall Street get themselves wiped out overnight...
...cycle of revenge and counterrevenge should be broken, but not by the abject submission of Americans in an Iranian psychodrama. In the first place, American meekness invites contempt not only in Iran but elsewhere in the world. Without acting with the pathological ferocity of revenge, Americans might want to administer a little of what psychologists call negative the when the time is right, something like the message that a hot stove delivers to someone who tries to sit on it. Both sides should remember, if they can, the Persian prov erb: "Blood cannot be washed away with blood." Revenge...