Word: exemplar
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...most notorious exemplar, though, is bin Laden, the Saudi-born terror kingpin charged with organizing the embassy bombings that killed 224 in Kenya and Tanzania two years ago. But even he represents only one part of the new-style problem: hundreds or perhaps thousands of tiny cells, each made up of a few like-minded zealots, nearly impossible to penetrate and linked only loosely through shared finances and training grounds...
Roosevelt, scarcely an exemplar of humility, nonetheless saved the possibility of governmental humility from the forces of utopian and dystopian arrogance. Totalitarian systems--whether fascist or communist--believe that those in charge know what's best for everyone else. But leaders who nurture democracy and freedom--who allow folks to make their own choices rather than dictating them from on high--are being laudably humble, an attitude that the 20th century clearly rewarded and one that is necessary for creating humane societies...
...manliness, the Old West cowboy. We were chatting about Westerns and cowboys one day in broken English--my German goes no further than "bier" and "bratwurst"--when he told me of his son's "cowboy coloring book." I was encouraged, to say the least, that America had given this exemplar of the strenuous life an untainted character worthy of his children's admiration (I never saw his son without a red John Wayne neckerchief). But then Christoph sang impromptu of the "Wicki-wicki Wild Wild West," paraphrasing Will Smith and breaking my heart...
...direction in which public life should move are highly derivative--although his chapter on the pervasive effects of irony and its corrosion of popular culture is original, very sophisticated, and compelling. But if you can cut through the occasional tediousness, what is left is the author as powerful exemplar of embodied faith and conviction, his emotion rousing correlative emotion in the reader. There is remarkable moral force behind Jedediah Purdy's introspection; a generation could do worse than to be moved by the example and the lucid expression of his passion...
...included in our survey another kind of exemplar: the icon, the embodiment of an ideal that affects the way we live or act, for better or worse. Marilyn Monroe, the paramount platinum goddess, became an indelible work of Pop art. The Kennedys gave off an aura in which Americans basked, happy to think that the U.S. had become a place where you could grow up to be royalty. Princess Diana, conversely, became a symbol of Everywoman's search for happiness...