Word: heroics
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...over the ease with which they had capitulated to Bush's no-new-taxes pledge, something close to the Administration's defense-spending target and budget chief Richard Darman's strategy of forcing Congress to make the fiscally necessary but unpopular cuts in domestic programs. "This is not a heroic agreement," said House Speaker Jim Wright, putting it mildly. And Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell cautioned, "No one should be deluded into thinking that this is the end of a process...
...abortion. Owen Meany goes a step beyond. "I'm moved and impressed by people with a great deal of religious faith," says Irving, an Episcopalian who admits that the compulsory churchgoing of his youth has had a cumulative effect. But, he adds, "the Christ story impresses me in heroic, not religious, terms...
...feeble draftsmanship in Clemente's washed-out frescoes should once have been applauded, or that the lurid bombast of even the better works of Cucchi, such as the droopy head that lies like a huge Dalinian watch along the cemetery roof in Stupid Picture, 1982, could have been thought heroic in scale. In fact, there is less scale in such work than brute size. To see what the scale of an image can mean in terms of real address to the eye, one must go a few rooms back and look, once more, at early De Chirico and Sironi...
...hagiographies and heroic tales, faith is tested by adversity. Wheelwright's challenge is vintage Irving, an event that is simultaneously horrifying and absurdly funny. It occurs during a Little League game in the summer of 1953 when Meany, in the lineup because his diminutive strike zone draws walks, swings away. He connects for a mighty foul ball that shoots toward the stands and fatally strikes Wheelwright's mother on the head. The game is suspended along with, it is hoped, the reader's disbelief...
...heroic adman learns that his son was set up to preserve the effectiveness of a British-run mole in the I.R.A. Maas cuts a clear line between his sympathy for the Irish cause and his aversion to cold-blooded violence. There is ice, too, in the veins of Britain's counterterrorists, and hypocrisy in the Republic of Ireland, whose constitution includes all of the Emerald Isle in its national territory. As one insider puts it, "It was an open secret that given its domestic economic woes, the last thing the republic's leadership wanted was to take on the burden...