Word: uncivilized
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...course, Platoon need not be every possible Viet Nam film to be the best one so far. It is enough that Stone has devised a drama of palpable realism that is also a metaphor for the uncivil war that raged in the U.S. and can flare up anytime in any family. Indeed, at the film's molten core is the tug of wills between two strong men, outsize figures of shameless strutting charisma, for parentage of their platoon and for their new recruit, Chris. Barnes, the staff sergeant, could be Chris' legal father; Elias, the romantic renegade, could...
...Adviser Paul Nitze, originated with a Soviet invitation ostensibly designed to get the stalled nuclear arms negotiations moving by clarifying the latest positions of each side. Yet when Perle and the six other Americans arrived on Sunday, they found their Kremlin counterparts to be unresponsive and even a bit uncivil. There was no fanfare in the Soviet press, nor was there a welcoming delegation at the Moscow airport. Under the current Soviet sobriety crackdown, there was no vodka either. The choice of an elegant suburban dacha for the talks was intended to encourage constructive informality for discussions normally cemented...
...students barricading the Lowell House Junior Common Room would undoubtedly have received more due process had they been arrested on the spot then they are likely to receive from a body that has virtually no experience in handling civil and uncivil disobedience. But the University did not have the guts to defend free speech at Harvard by arresting the students, just as police have arrested activists at colleges and South African consulates around the country...
Those who follow the column will rejoice at this second helping of Trillin's Nation material (the first collection of these columns, Uncivil Liberties, was published in 1982). But I would be remiss if I did not mention that there is reason to believe Trillin is becoming, as my mother used to put it, "a bit like Paul Revere's ride--a little light in the belfry...
There is a larger point to make here though and it's this: as Trillin feared, the absurdity of reality is catching up on him. In the introduction to Uncivil Liberties, Trillin explains that the challenge to an American humorist is to "concoct a situation so bizarre that it may not actually come to pass while his article is still on the presses ... in other words ... when Ronald Reagan appointed as Deputy Secretary of State a man who could not name the Prime Minister of South Africa, some Sunday newspaper satirist somewhere in America was groaning at having his joke...