Word: heroic
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...Glenn is gone. He is seen as a loving husband and a natural leader, unhesitant to put principles above career. Here he is humming The Battle Hymn of the Republic during reentry, there he is waving to the thousands crammed along the route of a ticker-tape parade. The heroic depiction of Glenn would be unremarkable except for one thing: the real life John Glenn, now 62 and the senior Senator from Ohio, is running for the Democratic presidential nomination. Never before has a major candidate been featured (and favorably, at that) in a big-budget Hollywood film released just...
...Philippine stability in the wake of the Aquino shooting echo the fears and doubts voiced about American democracy after the killing of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s. No society ever really depends for its survival on any individual, no matter how commanding or heroic. Marcos is in good health, but if he is unable to carry on, the 1973 constitution lays down an orderly method of succession...
Tastes change; each era meets the classics on new ground. At the approach of the 18th century, John Dryden offered Virgil as a master of the heroic couplet: "Arms, and the man I sing, who, forced by Fate,/ And haughty Juno's unrelenting hate." During the Victorian era, Aeneas emerged in the English of William Morris and other writers as a Romantic brooder well versed in Wordsworth's Ode to Duty. Fitzgerald's version, a century hence, may seem equally dated. But if translations capture the essence of their culture, then this Aeneid, in its supple beauty...
...domesticate some of the virtues that we find in Homer. The problem with the Homeric hero is, ultimately, that he takes individualism to an extreme. In Homer, you could never see a domesticated hero. It's a contradiction of terms. With Vergil, we're seeing the heroic within the social fabric...
...brought little sense of Wotan's majestic agony to his portrayal. After Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, he canceled his appearance in Siegfried and was replaced by a weak Bent Norup. Poor Manfred Jung, the substitute Siegfried, is physically unprepossessing and vocally inadequate to this most heroic of heldentenor roles, which demands both strength and stamina. Although he gave it a game effort, especially in Götterdammerung, Jung put one in mind of Scholar-Critic Ernest Newman's acidulous remark that too often Siegfried gives "the impression of a man whose mental development was arrested...