Word: righteousness
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Watch him at work in the 1946 It's a Wonderful Life, Frank Capra's Christmas confection with the bittersweet center. Stewart, as young George Bailey, is stepping up on one of his shaky soapboxes to tell off crippled town bully Lionel Barrymore. It is the first of many righteous harangues George will deliver, and at first he doesn't realize this one will get him in serious trouble, for he is talking himself into a lifetime sentence in Bedford Falls. Stewart seemed to spend most of his career on the threshold of puberty; the anguished ripple of a high...
MICHAEL MOORE So he's self-righteous, and the deal has cigarette holes. He's inhaling presidential fumes...
...without comprehension. As a Kentuckian, he understands a gun culture, but not the Westerners' devout hatred of the Federal Government. By now he is a wholly passive observer, as Offutt's narration heads off at right angles to itself, and the militia crazies prepare to end the tale in righteous fury. The author can't do for the Montana Aryans what he did for the Rocksalt garbage crew, which is to see them sympathetically, from the inside out. No one else has managed this, either. It's a writing job still to be done...
Another reflection concerns the nature of the political activism among Harvard's left, which consists mainly of liberals, progressives and a few radicals. For the most part, this group is too self-righteous and takes itself for too seriously...
...Many scholars, especially conservatives, are inclined to agree. Kreeft, the Everything You Wanted to Know author and an old-style Catholic, says the cause lies in mainline religion's skittering away from strong faith statements and the notions of absolute morality. "Heaven," he says, "is uncomfortable because it's righteous and holy, not just fun." Agrees David Wells, the Evangelical: "Today the objective is to try to feel better about ourselves rather than to differentiate people morally. If you reduce salvation to our state of well-being, heaven doesn't make a lot of sense." Wells wonders about the perils...