Word: public
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...past few Woody Allen films have flirted, in a provocatively meanspirited way, with the public aspects of his personality. Deconstructing Harry focused on Woody the selfish lover, Celebrity on Woody the capricious star. The new one has reverbs of Woody's Monday-night gigs in a classical jazz ensemble. Sweet and Lowdown is about one sour fellow, but it's another character who gives this minor movie a surprising lilt and afterglow...
...Cuba. The almost soap-operatic human dimension of the story of a boy separated from his natural father - who, by most accounts, was his primary caregiver - by an ideological dispute has been grist to the mill for Castro's propaganda machine, which has used it to rally Cuban public opinion against Washington...
...prove he's worthy of a vote? A long way, it seems. And now that McCain's campaign has released 1,500 pages of the senator's exhaustive medical records, some would-be voters are wondering if they really needed quite so much information about the presidential candidate. Public airing of certain tidbits, like the fact that the senator from Arizona uses a nasal spray for his seasonal hay fever, or that he had a herpetic lesion on his genitals (which disappeared without treatment!) may help to dissipate fears of lingering problems brought on by his ordeal...
...Steve Forbes had a colonoscopy recently, and perhaps Bill Bradley gave a charitable donation to the World Wildlife Fund in 1978. It's very possible that all the presidential candidates are judged by their family physicians to be in excellent physical and mental health. What does that tell the public? That it's unlikely George W. Bush will keel over during his term? That Al and Tipper Gore are, according to a private analyst, "happily married...
These days, because the public is largely convinced that complete disclosure somehow precludes any nasty surprises down the road, we want desperately to believe that we can know everything about the people who are running for president. And we've also convinced ourselves that it's our indisputable right to uncover as much as we can. And in the current, vaguely McCarthy-esque era of the public "right to know," we can rest assured that someone like FDR - whose physical health was in sharp decline and whose marriage was tortured - will probably never again make it past the New Hampshire...