Word: manichaean
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...grandiose new lighthouse already looks like an anomaly, while the old poverty huddling at its edges seems all too contemporary. Overarching light and enforced darkness, cheek by jowl. The Manichaean contrast is altogether fitting for this, the 500th anniversary of Columbus' world-shattering voyage, which is itself increasingly seen in opposing terms of black and white. The Columbus quincentennial officially kicks off this Columbus Day, Oct. 12 -- but it has even now generated enough contrast and controversy to outlast its appointed year and, quite possibly, this decade...
...sense, Limbaugh is only the latest and most extreme in a line of right-wing savants, from William F. Buckley Jr. to William Safire to Patrick Buchanan to P.J. O'Rourke, whose Manichaean world view and scathing wit make them livelier pundits than anyone in the gray liberal establishment. But he is also, and mainly, an old-fashioned radio spellbinder in the seductive Midwestern tradition of Jean Shepherd, Ken Nordine and Garrison Keillor. "Rush utilizes the medium better than any talk-show host I have ever heard," says veteran comedy writer Ken Levine, who with his partner David Isaacs...
...deeper, unstated thought is that acknowledging evil implies that Satan is coequal with God. Better not to open that door. It leads into the old Manichaean heresy: the world as battleground between the divine and the diabolical, the outcome very much in doubt: "La prima luce," Dante's light of creation, the brilliant ignition of God, against the satanic negation, the candle snuffer. Those uncomfortable with the idea of evil mean this: You don't say that the shadow has the same stature as the light. If you speak of the Dark Lord, of the "dark side of Sinai...
...days of the cold war. That characterization is not just simplistic -- it misses the irony of what is happening. The emerging U.S.-Soviet interplay is in some respects a throwback to the even older days of razzle-dazzle realpolitik, before the era of a global, Manichaean struggle between two ideologies...
...rooms of the policymaking establishment are filled with a new kind of head scratching. Some who have spent their careers fretting about the end of the world (the big bang of nuclear Armageddon) are suddenly lamenting "the end of history"; now that the good guys have won and the Manichaean struggle is over, humanity will have nothing but a lot of boring technical and local problems to deal with. It is a silly idea but a telling one, for it underscores the dilemma facing all Western foreign-policy thinkers * and doers, starting with George Bush: the fading of the cold...