Word: tragical
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...only a modernist reading of the artist's role makes it seem contradictory that Goya was both a court artist and an inspired, tragic social critic. Efforts to see him in pop-Marxist terms as "an artist of the people" miss the point. Goya had many disillusioned moments, and by the last years of his life, when -- sick and old and bitterly disappointed by the betrayal of the liberal Spanish constitution at the hands of that squat reactionary King, Fernando VII -- he moved to France, they became a continuous pessimism. He never idealized the Spanish proletariat: it was el populacho...
...selling weapons and attempted robbery, walk into a gun shop in Sandy, Ore., and leave with an AK-47 under his arm? The easy availability of weapons like this, which have no purpose other than killing human beings, can all too readily turn the delusions of sick gunmen into tragic nightmares...
While not ruling out pilot error, investigators are focusing on the possibility that the plane's electronic fire-alarm system failed and indicated trouble in the wrong engine, leading to a tragic mistake. As other Boeing 737s are being checked, the remains of Flight 92's engines have been sent back to their French co-maker, SNECMA, for examination...
These TV sagas allow the audience to relive a sensational news story in a compact two- or four-hour chunk, with climaxes italicized and ambiguities excised. More subtly, they help viewers cope with tragic events by imparting the foreknowledge of God. Seemingly random occurrences of day-to-day life take on major significance with TV-movie hindsight. Early in Karen Carpenter, the teen-age Richard Carpenter grabs a pizza from his little sister. "You don't want to get fat, do you?" he taunts. Ah, if only they knew...
...mean blindness. Asimov is alarmed by overpopulation, with its insatiable demand for natural resources. He is not sanguine about the medical establishment's inability to find a cure for AIDS: "It may just burn itself out the way the bubonic plague did in the London of 1665. But this tragic disease moves much more slowly. It might take a century to disappear." And wars and weapons continually remind him about the fragility of Spaceship Earth. But in the Asimovian view, that fragility is an echo of his personal history. He was felled by a heart attack in 1977 and underwent...