Word: heroism
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...letter, Mbeki describes his admiration for the central character in his favorite Shakespeare play, Coriolanus, who set out, as he wrote, with "truthfulness, courage, self-sacrifice, absence of self-seeking, brotherliness, heroism, optimism." Mbeki aspired to the same qualities, to be a "person who does good, and does it honestly," he tells Gevisser. But Coriolanus is a tragedy. The hero becomes a vainglorious despot. Mbeki is no Coriolanus, but as his paranoia and isolation reached new heights last year, Zwelinzima Vavi, the general secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, warned the country may be "drifting toward dictatorship...
...this happened in their grandfathers' time, and the living bear no responsibility for it. This is Prime Minister Howard's view too, although--significantly enough--he is quick to drape himself in the nobler emblems of Australian history with which his generation had nothing to do, such as the heroism of the soldiers at Gallipoli...
...national identity but also of shared folk heroes. You can count them on less than two hands. Two are alive--the great cricketer Donald Bradman, now 91, and the swimming champion Dawn Fraser. The veterans of Gallipoli, a few of whom still live, are invested with a collective heroism. The other heroes are dead. They include a racehorse, Phar Lap; and a criminal, the bushranger, Irish nationalist and protorepublican Ned Kelly, hanged for theft and murder in Melbourne...
...Barbara K. Lewalski, a history and literature professor, regarding the surprising nature of Paradise Lost given that is an epic poem. As she said in her opening remarks, “there are no warriors and battles. The whole epic is about a kind of reconsideration of what heroism is.” In addition to a complete reading of the entire poem, the Milton marathon included a re-enactment of the climactic moment when Adam, played by Benjamin M. Woodring, who is in his first year of the English PhD program, and Eve, played by Danielle C. Kijewski...
...touch. But that's the casethis week in Southern California, as the last of the wildfires that burned more than 500,000 acres (about 200,000 hectares) wink out. Even as the blackened landscape still smokes and pops, the nation is sorting through the equal measures of heroism and folly that accompany such disasters...