Word: utopianizing
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During the painful viewing of Save the Last Dance, look carefully for elements that prove to jaded audiences how sickening the utopian relationship world of the film really is. First notice Julia Stiles. She’s really annoying in this movie. Why would anyone want to date her anyway? Unless you grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, would you really feel sorry for the well-off suburban girl who is forced to “descend” into the depravity of largely black urban Chicago? Nope. We’d laugh at you. Get some perspective. Also note that...
What is it with architects? They all think they're specialists in the future. There may be no professionals?outside of absolute dictators?so prone to the commanding vision or the impulse to usher daily life into new arrangements. Ambitious architects are always reimagining whole cities along utopian lines, but the road to utopia has a way of becoming the path to hell. Think of Le Corbusier's Radiant City. His prescription for the ideal urban plan, isolated towers on wide plazas, turned out to be a blueprint for the deadliest kind of downtown and the worst sort of housing...
...defective previous course. A moderate turn, if one is coming, will be inferred from straws in the wind. As for Cheney and Rumsfeld, both were complicit in rose-petal scenarios in the first term. It stands to reason that each may be less susceptible to bellicose fantasies floated by Utopian underlings...
...pendulum swing. His attempt to throw money at urban problems created all sorts of unintended consequences. It hastened a new culture of poverty, subsidizing the collapse of poor families, reinforcing a plague of out-of-wedlock births and soaring crime rates. And Bush's attempt to confront tyranny with utopian bellicosity may presage the end of the conservative pendulum swing. It flies in the face of reality. The Iraq fiasco has weakened our military and our standing in the world. Indeed, our intemperate behavior has sent a powerful countermessage. The unpunished excesses of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib give a rationale...
...Death Kit. Neither one made it seem that fiction was her natural milieu. But she went on to publish some fine and original short stories and eventually returned to the novel with new juices flowing. In America, her story of a 19th century Polish actress who sets up a utopian commune in California, won the National Book Award in 2000. But it was as a tireless, all-purpose cultural critic that she made her lasting mark. "Sometimes," she once said, "I feel that, in the end, all I am really defending ... is the idea of seriousness, of true seriousness...