Word: utopianizing
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...goes the premise of "Demolition Man," the new action movie starring Stallone and Snipes as a supercop and a supercrook who are cryogenically frozen in the year 1996 (that's right, three years from now) and then let loose to do battle in the utopian year 2032. In spite of this promisingly elaborate premise, the filmmakers forsake any attempt at an original or engaging story in favor of a tiresome series of jabs at flakey Californian political correctness...
...life into the tired space-station project and indeed into the entire once great, once imagination-grabbing American space program. As it turns out, that idea was too good to be true. The new space station approved by Clinton and the Congress last month bears little evidence of that utopian dream. So far there is no mention of hooking up with the Russian Mir space station or of Mir 2, due in 1996. No mention of using the huge Russian Energia rocket to save billions in launch costs. If anything, the plans underscore once again the uselessness of the space...
Indeed, despite the freshness of his diagnosis of social problems, West's prescriptions for curing them can be vague and hopelessly Utopian. He advocates a "politics of conversion" in which blacks and other oppressed people would "affirm themselves as human beings, no longer viewing their bodies, minds and souls through white lenses and believing themselves capable of taking control of their own destinies." That would translate into a new surge of grass-roots activism, the building of coalitions between now competing groups, and "large-scale public intervention to ensure access to basic social goods." In other words, critics charge, reconstituting...
...loans to health clubs to Chino-Latino cuisine. For a while there were no limits: on growth, on space, on creativity, on wealth, on tolerance of the new and the foreign. Never mind the earthquakes, the smog, the religious cults. Those were just the shadows around an otherwise Utopian vision. And the new arrivals to the City of Angels and its palmy suburbs just kept on coming...
...play is so naively utopian, which is why the naive characters, Jessica and the pastor, express the point of view of the play. I think it's simultaneously important to have that innocence and also to recognize the situation we're in. For me, the Pirandellian scene was a counter-point: what actually happens when you talk about these things is everybody gets pissed off. The play acknowledges the reality of the situation and at the same time hopes that there can be a sort of transcendence...