Word: spirits
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Even at 50, though, pregnancy and childbirth can put a terrible strain on a woman's body, and the demands of child rearing can do the same to both body and spirit. Some observers believe it is not fair to the child. "When that child is of college age," observes John Paris, professor of bioethics at Boston College and a Jesuit priest, speaking of the 62-year-old Italian woman's offspring, "his mother will be 80." That is, if she is still alive. "We're designing orphans by choice, and we say this is O.K.," he says...
...while, it's possible to hope that Good Will Hunting may partake of the same exuberant spirit. Damon's title character, Will Hunting (isn't that cute?), is a janitor at M.I.T., solving impossible equations a professor leaves on a blackboard. After hours, though, he joins his lowlife South Boston cronies for stupid boozing and brawling. Class issues, rarely raised in American movies, seem about to be interestingly engaged. But no, Will's inability to find love and embrace his upscale destiny is the product of childhood abuse, the memory of which he must recover. This brings on Robin Williams...
...rants about press accounts implying that Kennedy's Harvard intellectuals were decamping, abandoning the White House to a bunch of Texas yokels: "It's just a damned lie is what it is. Why, I got this little ole boy, Trillin, who wrote me a brilliant speech called 'The Spirit of St. George.' Smartest little booger you'd ever hope to meet. He can write circles around those Harvard pissants...
...think I'd begin with "The Spirit of St. George," which I wrote for L.B.J. to deliver in Salt Lake City. It challenged Americans to have the sort of spirit the Mormons demonstrated in the 19th century when, rather than settle into the relatively comfortable life they'd managed to build in Salt Lake City, they trekked back into the wilderness to found a temple at St. George, Utah...
...speeches must be in Volume II. As I envision it, L.B.J. is alone in the Oval Office during one of the darkest days of the war in Vietnam. He is looking for inspiration. Idly, he picks up a manuscript from a pile on his desk. It is titled "The Spirit of St. George." He begins to read aloud...