Word: transgressors
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...movies, popular music, latterly television, has remained stubbornly locked to the 19th century traditions of melodrama and romance. We may admire the multiple narrators of Citizen Kane, not to mention its sheer panache; we may adore Bart Simpson, not least because he's such a self-conscious little transgressor, so aware of both his self-destructive impulses and his generally thwarted impulse to be better. But we have to admit that these remain rather lonely modernist gestures in mass culture. And pretty small potatoes compared with Ulysses or The Waste Land...
Charles Krauthammer is correct in thinking America's intervention in humanitarian crises such as the one in East Timor [ESSAY, Sept. 27] is dictated by the importance attached to the transgressor in terms of foreign policy. It seems as if nations such as Russia, China and Indonesia literally get away with murder. By that token, what can be read into the apathy shown toward Africa's humanitarian crises? None of the transgressors can be considered "important" in that context, so why have America and the rest of the world shown scant interest in the suffering of the innocent civilians...
...Peter Schjeldahl points out in the catalog, Dubuffet "had the transgressor's secret love of limits, the outlaw's perverse attachment to laws," and this repeatedly shows itself in a sense of surface, texture and inflection that becomes extravagantly, almost morbidly, refined. His figures made of butterfly wings are exquisite; looking at some of his surfaces, particularly in the later collages and "Texturologies" of the 1950s, one finds oneself comparing them to the tarnished and mottled silver leaf on a Japanese screen or to richly tanned and patinated leather. Doubtless some of them present insoluble problems for the conservator...
Bush's scenario? The peeved leader of a Third World country decides to nuke the good ol' U.S. of A. Fortunately, as the missile streams toward Milwaukee, a "brilliant pebble" comes to life and annihilates the transgressor missile, thus saving Milwaukee, the Brewers and world peace. Of course, the U.S. military moves in and cleans up the offending nation, reestablishing democracy and brotherly love...
...room for improvement. In a 1985 survey by the American Society of Newspaper Editors, more than 78% of the people questioned believed the press does not "worry much about hurting people." Almost two-thirds of the respondents agreed that journalists take advantage of victims of circumstance. Perhaps the worst transgressor is the TV camera operator who zooms in on the face of a dead person's relative -- and stays there as the face dissolves in grief. Says Anne Seymour, public affairs director for the National Victim Center in Fort Worth: "Any time there is a yellow line, some journalists...