Word: zealotism
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...everyone charmed by all those quaint es in "olde" and "shoppe" that adorn so many signs in America's historic "townes"? Evidently there is a citizen of Alexandria, Va., who isn't. The anonymous zealot set forth one night with a brush and a can of brown paint and x-ed out the superfluous es in the Olde Towne Flower Shoppe sign. Elaine's of Olde Town, the Kitchen Shoppe, and the Olde Towne Tennis Shop also soon fell prey. This cultural resistance movement is causing, well, some local unease. "We don't know...
...strategy to separate a pragmatist from a zealot...
...save the world and end up wreaking more havoc than happiness. The most memorable and, sadly, the most prescient example of this theme came in Greene's The Quiet American, about Vietnam in the days when the Americans were still only supplying arms to the French. The reformist zealot there was a clean-cut, self-serious American adviser named Pyle who was bent on saving the Vietnamese for Democracy--by strategically wiping them out--and took as his bible the cold-warring treatises of an Ivy League academic named York Harding (Walt Rostow? Probably; it was too early...
...host of the zany NBC's Saturday Night Live. In one routine he deadpanned his way through a comic turn satirizing none other than Ralph Nader. The effort backfired in one respect: though the skit was indeed amusing, Nader portrayed himself altogether too accurately as a driven zealot. Congressmen agree that Nader does his homework, but they are repelled by his insistence that his position is the only morally right one. Says Representative David Obey, Wisconsin Democrat: "Members are just fed up with being equated with evil if they vote against Nader...
...himself is no zealot, nor is he especially religious. But his father Aaron won a Medal of Honor in the Battle of the Wilderness, and young Seth is passionately idealistic about the U.S. The Jewish virtues (as he sees them) of intelligence, industry and warmth are precisely those of the American character, Seth feels. The anti-Semitism that persists is a dwindling residue from the Old World, and what is important is that Jews can take their part in U.S. society with out apology or fearfulness...