Word: mindlessness
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...THAN A MIRACLE. A beautiful peasant girl (Sophia Loren) brazenly steals a horse from the handsome prince (Omar Sharif), gets herself a job making omelets in the palace kitchen, beats out seven princesses after a dishwashing contest, finally catches the prince and lives happily ever after in this utterly mindless but totally delightful fairy tale...
...when wrong, to be put right." Who decides what is right and what is wrong? The Schurz position suggests that the only valid answer to that question is the free individual conscience-indeed, that true love of country involves criticism as well as praise, for mere acquiescence may be mindless indifference...
...that is what happens in an utterly mindless but totally endearing fairy tale, starring Omar Sharif as the prince and Sophia Loren as the girl. It was directed by Francesco Rosi, who is best known for his harrowing bullfight epic, The Moment of Truth. That anybody would bother these days to make so slender and fanciful a film is a miracle in itself; to do it with such a profusion of visual beauty is More than a Miracle. Which, by the way, is its title...
...policy. It is because we have always had such persons in sufficient numbers that we have governed ourselves successfully in the past, and they are not the less the occasion for confidence on that score in the future. Our students today are not raising hell because they are mindless, but precisely because they are thoughtful. Which is a different thing from being wise, but surely a precondition of wisdom. All in all a good state of affairs for a society that can respond to it. The question is what that response...
Since the publication of Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest on February 1, 1929, the best crime novels have not offered much in the way of escape or solid, mindless entertainment. Nowadays, even the casual student of the American pathologies, public and private, may find the fiction of mayhem crucially disturbing and very much worth the reading. The worst examples of the genre present the symptoms of our virulent malady in pure form, and a new Mickey Spillaine is not pleasant going, precisely because it has roughly the same significance as a fresh mass murder. The best books of the type...