Word: stanton
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...Television and the movies have never, in my experience, turned a responsible youngster into a criminal," says Stanton Samenow, author of Before It's Too Late: Why Some Kids Get into Trouble and What Parents Can Do About It. "But a youngster who is already inclined toward antisocial behavior hears of a particular crime, and it feeds an already fertile mind." Most children resist the worst temptations, he says. The trick is to recognize the ones who do not. "If you have a child who increasingly is lying instead of putting some value on the truth, a child...
This is what presidential candidate Jack Stanton tells his protege Henry Burton at the end of Primary Colors, a new film adapted from the best-selling novel by journalist Joe Klein; and it's the message we're left with after what amounts to an entertaining embellishment of the 1992 Clinton campaign...
...Burton, Stanton's campaign director (the George Stephanopolous character), learns this lesson the hard way but does finally accept it in all of its cynicism; and the idea is that we should, too. In fact, the message at the end of "Primary Colors" seems to be intended as a universal principle: in order to do good, you also have to be a whore or a hypocrite...
...although one that it is considerably harder to accept--at least for the young, inexperienced and idealistic--and one that she therefore spends less time developing. The real crux of Steinem's argument and the only persuasive aspect of it is simply an echo of the message of Jack Stanton: you've got to be a whore in order to change the world...
Well, what can you do but cry when you've devoted yourself to a candidate like Primary Colors' Jack Stanton--charming, idealistic in some ways, but more than a little slippery? That's the kind of presidential timber we've been getting in the movies lately. Men apt to cut a few moral corners, and then a few more, until all the right angles are as smooth as they are. Men with the scruples of the off-screen President in Wag the Dog, who is caught in a scandal with an underage girl. Or of President Gene Hackman in Absolute...