Word: visione
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...VISION OF BATTLEMENTS, by Anthony Burgess. This wry account of a hapless young Briton's jousts with the military bullies and oafs stationed on Gibraltar during and after World War II shines like a Faberge bauble when compared with the usual assortment of wartime fictional reminiscences...
...merely pumped-up prose. As playmaking, it is wildly, datedly implausible. Ethnically, it suggests that minority groups in the U.S. have a manifest destiny to disappear. The success of the dream is the death of the dream, and in one glamorous assimilationist triumph, President Kennedy abolished the limited Irish vision of local bosses, ward-heelers who could imagine no greater glory than to be nimble crumb collectors at the table of power...
Justice v. Fate. This monistic vision falsifies life. Man is a beast - he may also be a saint, a sage, or an averagely decent human being. Like Arthur Miller, another public accountant of guilt, Sartre wants to even the score of past wrongs, to wrench justice from fate. This mentality is impervious to the tragic sense, the view of existence best expressed by Ortega y Gasset when he said: "The condition of man is essential uncertainty. Man feels himself lost, shipwrecked." Nor can Sartre, as an atheist, accept the dispensation of Christian grace, which redeems the sinner without denying...
...part of this determination, he is still asking uncomfortable questions. Oglesby began his speech. Thursday night by exploring the humane, liberal vision which leads good men to wage war in Vietnam. From this view point, we stand as a nation which endured the burdens of the Cold War in the 1950's in order to protect Western Europe and ourselves from the "social acid" of Communism. After 1962, the metabolism of the Cold War changed: for both the U.S. and the USSR, international politics became gradually secularized. The metaphysical became negotiable, the abhorrent understandable, to the extent that we could...
...when confronting revolutionary Asia, the humane American vision slips over into terror, and the Cold War mind -- "suspicious, dramatic, and above all, rational," reaches its most dangerous conclusions. To justify the defense of our wealth, and to satisfy our psyches, we see every social upheaval as a conspiracy: the National Liberation Front is controlled by Hanoi, and Hanoi by Peking. Oglesby suggests, more than half seriously, that we are fighting to show China that it must control Hanoi and the NLF, in order to create a rational Asian Communist coalition. We are practicing, Oglesby says, a politics of nostalgia...