Word: vision
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...events were significant, but not central to the drama. For the essential 1968 was mythic. It proceeded chaotically, and yet finally had the coherence and force of tragedy. And if it was the end of some things (of the civil rights movement, of Lyndon Johnson's generous social vision, of the liberals' hope to keep government on its trajectory), it prepared the way for other beginnings: the women's movement, the environmental movement, the complex reverberant life that the '60s would have in the American mind long after the melodrama was over and those previously on fire went to tend...
...King--to turn a nation in on itself, to confront its own conscience. As one writer has put it, Dr. King was successful because when Southerners "smote him--as they inevtiably must--they hurt them selves...In the end, it was the power of their own idealized vision of themselves as Christians, transcended into Blackness, personified in King and him, a seemingly loving and non-violent host, that shook them to the roots of self." But we are rarely shaken to such depths today...
...myopic arrogance of the high, and above all the limitless cruelties inflicted in the name of orthodoxy (by the Inquisition) and political conquest (by the invading French and their guerrilla opponents): these possess him as they have possessed no other artist before or since. Seen through his encyclopedic vision of folly and cruelty, Goya's Spain is more like Dean Swift's Ireland than Voltaire's Europe...
...supply-side nostrums represented "voodoo economics." Sometimes it was dispiriting: Bush changed his positions on issues like abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment in order to conform to Reagan's views. His most blatantly fawning behavior, like saluting Jerry Falwell ("America is in crying need of the moral vision you have brought to our political life") and praising William Loeb, the New Hampshire publisher who had belittled him, caused critics to wonder about Bush's "corruption of ambition." Even George Will, one of the conservatives whose support Bush most coveted, was repelled. "The unpleasant sound Bush is emitting...
While there is no nation so blessed as ours, with a natural temperament and natural resources conducive to success, Reagan's vision of a future in which all Americans have a chance to achieve the proverbial American Dream is flawed and Panglossian. His message seems not to be that we should create this bright future, but that it will create itself if we don't interfere...