Word: villains
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...another volatile brew of megalomania and macho sentiment. To his new critics, the film may seem deliriously irresponsible, madly muttering like a street raver. But to readers of myriad espionage novels and political-science fictions, in which the CIA or some other gentlemen's cabal is always the villain, the movie's thesis will be a familiar web spinning of high-level malevolence. JFK is Ludlum or Le Carre, but for real...
...there is a villain to this story, it has to be this liberal political establishment so wed to its paternal power over American Blacks that it will stop at nothing--and stoop to anything--to prevent the inevitable erosion of power that an articulate and unbeholden new Black leadership represents. If anyone was "out of touch with reality," to quote Sen. Howell Heflin (D-Ala.), it was what's left of the left...
...Kozol and many activist reformers, the chief villain of the education tragedy is "local control," America's decentralized system of school administration and its heavy reliance on property taxation. Everything from pencils to teachers' salaries is paid for through a patchwork process that varies from state to state. But in most cases, about 6% of the money in any district comes from Washington, 47% from the state government and 47% from locally generated property taxes. Kozol believes the best way to improve schools -- all schools -- would be to do away completely with the property tax as a source of revenue...
...latest venture into fact crime, Cruel Doubt (Simon & Schuster; 460 pages; $25), McGinniss has swung to the opposite pole. Eleven months after Malcolm's devastating piece, he began to write the story of Bonnie Von Stein, a North Carolina woman who was unquestionably a victim rather than a villain. Her husband was bludgeoned and stabbed to death beside her as they lay in bed at home; she too was battered and nearly died. Despite her injuries, she was unjustly treated as a suspect for many months, as was her daughter. She suffered a mother's worst nightmare when...
...quite a while before writers find an arena as morally complex or financially rewarding. Before World War II, the spy novelist usually took the low road: the hero was implausibly good, as in John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps. Evil was unambiguous. Sax Rohmer invested his villain, Fu Manchu, "with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race . . . the Yellow Peril incarnate." But in the postwar period the public grew weary of caricatures, and only Ian Fleming could profitably drive on the old thoroughfare, with men like Doctor No and Goldfinger in the backseat...