Word: superhumans
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...Arroyo, the talk in Manila is about People Power fatigue. There's a palpable?and desperate?sense that the more we change things, the more they remain the same. Once again, it seems, we are trapped in a destructive political cycle: we elect Presidents and expect them to be superhuman?solving every conceivable problem and delivering the nation from misery and failure; when they fail to live up to such lofty demands, we seek to depose them...
Umpires missed calls. Players booted balls. Ace pitchers looked average, and slumping hitters seemed superhuman...
Even in his playing years Cobb assumed a mythic stature. The garrulous Casey Stengel summed up his contemporary in a lone sentence: "It was like he was superhuman." Others would say subhuman. On his most courteous afternoons, Cobb slid in, spikes high and sharpened to maim. He wrangled with teammates, two wives, five children and innumerable ticket holders. When a New York fan taunted him, Cobb climbed into the stands and stomped the offender. It was later pointed out that the stompee had been missing all of one hand and three fingers of the other. Cobb replied tenderly...
...geodesic variety, an open latticework of metal bars on which the crowd clambers and clings, forming a subhuman wall of ecstatically writhing bodies and bloodlusting faces. Scattered about the structure are various objects useful in carnage (a chain saw, a huge mallet, a viciously shaped sword of superhuman dimensions). The gladiators are placed in slings that are in turn attached to industrial-strength rubber bands. Boiing! They bounce off the walls and fly at each other with comic, alarming force. Piing! They are catapulted into the dome's upper reaches, grabbing frantically for whatever weapon comes to flailing hand. Spriing...
...lovers. Yet the difficulties seem to be overcome too smugly; the books too often end with a complacent cadence that seems to say: "Thus I prevailed over this hardship too. Thus I grew." Perhaps this will always be one of the shortcomings of the memoir: that it takes a superhuman effort on the part of the writer to distance himself from these stories that are, after all, his own life. Continents of Exile, now that is completed, will probably induce other memoir writers to undertake works of corresponding scale and ambition. But it should also serve as a cautionary example...