Word: scarlett
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Perhaps it is simply more of Clinton's luck. He is the most resilient Southerner since Scarlett O'Hara. Clinton has built a career around the truth that tomorrow is another day. And in a television age, everyone forgets everything within a few minutes anyway--each discontinuous moment being rinsed clean a moment later, sins washed away in the sacrament of absolution by oblivion. But arranging to have his second term end in the year 2001 is a stroke of public relations genius. Tomorrow is another...millennium...
...Manny (Scarlett Johansson) is a wise and watchful child of 11. Lo (Aleksa Palladino) is a scared and angry young woman of 16. Orphaned sisters escaping foster care, they have hit the road in their mom's old car, subsisting on junk food but sheltering luxuriously, first in the model homes of newly built subdivisions, then in a vacant ski chalet...
...Amanda (Scarlett Johansson) and Laurel (Aleksa Palladino), according to convention hereafter referred to as "Manny" and "Lo," survive through shoplifting, house-breaking-and-sleeping-in, and the liberal use of their deceased mother's station wagon. When Lo gets undeniably pregnant, the spunky pair adds a bigger crime to their misdemeanors and kidnap a staid ex-nurse (Mary Kay Place) incongruously behind the counter at one of those sickeningly precious baby supplies stores. They then hole up at an abandoned country house. Barring some frenzied running around at the end, most of the film takes place there amidst woodsy surroundings...
...York Times theater critic noticed "the extraordinary artistry of a high-stepping, little dusky creature who describes herself as Butterfly McQueen." Two years later, the world saw McQueen as Prissy, the comically incompetent slave in the film classic Gone With the Wind. Her panicked "Lawdy, Miz Scarlett. I don't know nothing about birthing babies!" became one of the most quoted lines in movie history--and in later years, a focus of criticism for fitting an "Uncle Thomasina" stereotype. Ironically, McQueen herself fought to humanize the role, refusing to perform even greater indignities like a watermelon-eating scene...
Anyone past adolescence knows what moral to draw from the Scarlett and Ashley Wilkes story: Keep your dreams if you like (though Ashley may turn out to be to be a jerk when deprived of his chivalric mystique), but work with what you have--which Scarlett, God knows, did. Americans get the Presidents they exert themselves to deserve. That may or may not be a good thing; it is a mistake to get prissy about it. Selflessness shades into self-righteousness. If Presidents are chosen by the exertions of selfless zealots, the process may prove dangerously unrepresentative...