Word: utopianizing
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National service -- the image of a vast civilian army of fresh-faced young people embarking on a crusade of good works -- has always held romantic appeal for adults safely beyond draft age. Utopian visionary Edward Bellamy originally broached the notion more than a century ago. Philosopher William James alluded to it in his famous 1910 essay, "The Moral Equivalent of War." Franklin Roosevelt in 1943 spoke of a postwar America where young adults would make a "year's contribution of service to the Government." At the height of the Viet Nam buildup, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara proposed compulsory national service...
...world. One is an internationalism of the kind envisioned briefly in the mid-1940s by the Western founders of the U.N. but made impossible by the cold war. In the absence of intractable ideological conflict between the U.S. and the Soviets, internationalism would no longer be a hopelessly utopian idea. (In fact, even during the cold war, when the U.S. and the Soviet Union found a temporary convergence of interests, they have been able jointly to control regional conflicts, such as Sinai, 1956, for example.) The Security Council could try to manage the world as a committee of the great...
...music, we see that they are truly stirred by the 60's anthem. It's one of the few moments when it seems there was something these people really believed in, something they fought for. We also see that their dream had as much to do with a utopian (what we now tend to disparage as "touchyfeely") vision of how people would treat each other as it did with social change. We understand then that the '60s promised to a generation that youth and idealism could really make a difference...
Preston Tucker (Jeff Bridges, in the performance of his life) knows better. He just nods sober agreement with Hughes. He is in the process of creating a utopian automobile that will get no further off the ground, commercially speaking, than the Goose did. But who cares? He is not in the business of building empires; he is in the business of building dreams. And for him, as for Hughes, it is necessary to reproduce his fancy only once in reality to achieve fulfillment. Indeed, after seeing Francis Coppola's marvelous Tucker, one believes that if the inventor had been forced...
...torture, the tear gas, the murders of schoolchildren that Sarafina! depicts, and for all the agony of apartheid that its players have experienced, America, in its midtown-Manhattan incarnation, seems far from utopian. "Before I came, I thought the U.S. would be like a small heaven," said Thandani Mavimbela of Hlabisa, a rural village in Natal province. "I thought it would be like on TV -- The Boat of Love. Love Boat? Or Dallas. But then you see places like Harlem. I was shocked. The empty, burned buildings. On Broadway, very poor people sleeping on the street. In South Africa, when...