Word: myth
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...hostile question." Gomes makes cheerful academic jokes (on Ascension Day: "It is the Lord who graduates") and will quote Ogden Nash or Woody Allen as freely as Crisis Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. But he offers no easy optimism or simple uplift to his young charges. "Human progress is a foolish myth of epic proportions," Gomes insists. "It is the fantasy of our age and time. Human perseverance in the face of human folly, it is that of which the kingdom of heaven is made...
Alone among public institutions, the U.S. Supreme Court has remained an Olympian myth: nine sages in black robes, unelected, unreviewable, pronouncing the last word on the law. Throughout its 190-year existence, the court's decision-making process has enjoyed a special immunity from public scrutiny. Even during the '70s, in the post-Watergate era of full disclosure, its white marble temple stood as a sanctuary, its inner workings Washington's last well-kept secret...
...obscure what the Justices are really struggling with: the application of the law and the Constitution to complex moral and social questions like abortion, obscenity, busing, the death penalty. The notion that such issues can be considered solely in terms of abstract and impersonal principle is, of course, a myth. Inevitably there are times when the Justices end up voting their own convictions. "Result oriented" jurisprudence such as this has been criticized for years. But a Justice has to persuade his colleagues to produce a five-man majority; votes change and compromises are struck as individual opinions are exposed...
...half spent playing and warring together, the three senior Who members may be like brothers, but with undercurrents of the Karamazovs and an overlay of the Dalton boys. It is not only a matter of maintaining a punishingly high musical standard; The Who has the weight of its own myth and the burden of its own history to support...
...only thing great about Katherine Graham portrayed here is her ability to create "myth that lived on as history, ad truth"--in other words, to lie and get away with it. How does the author support such an audacious accusation? Davis disdains hard facts and instead relies on her own presumptuous brand of psychology. "Once a widow, always a widow" Davis's primer seems to say; and Graham's pruported insecurities are accordingly traced to her prolonged grief over husband Philip's suicide. She plays the party line because she craves the approval of her Presidents...