Word: heroic
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Skeptics suggested the Quang Due's heart had been removed from the body before cremation, or had been injected with a fire-resisting fluid. Certainly the phenomenon was far from original; down through the ages, in legend and fact, the hearts of heroic figures have more than once withstood the flames.*But the "miracle" serves the Buddhists in their two-month-old war with Diem. Thanks partly to pressure from the U.S., which fears that massive Buddhist disaffection could wreck South Viet Nam's long, vital campaign against the Communists, the Diem government signed a compromise agreeing...
...marathon visit to Moscow was over, and his beaming host had a few words of farewell before sending the honored guest off to southern Russia to loll in the sun for a while. With Castro standing beside him in Lenin Stadium, Nikita Khrushchev by turns praised Cuba's heroic "revolt against tyranny," pleaded for coexistence with the U.S., and angrily threatened nuclear war if the U.S. dared lay a hand on Cuba. He even rang in the American Declaration of Independence, quoting: "Whenever any form of government becomes destructive . . . it is the right of the people to alter...
...thus a failed product of (or triumphant escapee from) that satanic parody of the confessional-the brainwashing process wherein men confess to crimes they have not committed to men who have no power to absolve. Yet Pope and Commissar understand, and, in a deep sense, love each other as heroic representatives of opposing faiths...
...Question of Courage. Arendt has a romantic notion that it was simple to stand up to Hitler, and that those who did usually made Hitler back down. As an example, she cites the heroic refusal of the Danes to deliver up Jews. Confronted with Danish obstinacy, she writes, "Nazi toughness melted like butter." But the fact is that the Danes were able to protect the Jews because they had much more autonomy than most of the Nazi satellite nations; and they had been granted this autonomy by Hitler because they had not opposed the Nazi invasion...
Robbins has shown no sense of the play's heroic proportions. He has turned Mother Courage into a wit; her retorts, her quips, the timing of her speech is better suited to Shaw or Wilde than to Brecht. Her power becomes verbal; its physical and emotional aspects fade. Minor characters, too were misdirected or badly cast. Ignoring Brecht's colorful human vignettes, Robbins simply instructed the peripheral figures to recite their lines (and they didn't even do that accurately...