Word: oppression
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Citizen Cane. Orsen Welles, Joseph Cotton, Agnes Moorehead. Maybe the great American movie. Welles plays a tycoon, modelled after William Randolph Hearst, whose spiralling climb to wealth and power is paralleled by his decline into emotional paralysis. This takes shape cinematically in ever deeper focus shots that oppress Welles ever smaller, ever less impotent and more isolated within the frame. Don't waste your time wondering about Rosebud (it is the name of his sled. Lost innocence, get it. Right, the only woman he ever loved was his mother). Orson Welles...
Velho da Costa, by contrast, is more charitable toward males: "Society and social oppression are not made by men alone, but by historical structures and thought patterns that oppress all of us." Moreover, she sees dangers in uncompromising militancy. "I value the feminist movement, as I value all activist movements that contribute to the struggle for human freedom," she says. "But in their fury and their aggressiveness and their mono-mindedness, women in the movement are proving just as 'phallic' as men, and that is what they should want to avoid. If we fight fire with fire...
...eyes of ardent feminists, psychiatrists and psychologists rank high-if not highest-on the list of males who oppress women. The most recent and radical statement of this view is a book called Women and Madness (Doubleday; $8.95) by Phyllis Chesler, a self-styled anarchist who teaches psychology at the City University of New York. The militant wing of Women's Lib enthusiastically approves Author Chesler's attack, and some psychotherapists admit that there is a measure of truth in what she says. The consensus, however, seems to be that her charges are both overstated and underdocumented...
...which says that naturally occuring human diversity leads to the extension of one person's power over another. It is possible to construct a society which emphasizes cooperation and no competition; a society which embraces human diversity, not as an opportunity for one group of men and women to oppress another group, but as a gift which can be used to the benefit of all. In such a society, human diversity is not measured but enjoyed...
After that book was published, Medvedev was fired from his job as head of the Obninsk radiological institute, 35 miles southwest of Moscow. Unable to find another job, he set about writing a calm, straightforward survey of the restrictions, censorship, and surveillance that oppress many Soviet intellectuals. This work too found its way to the West via samizdat (literally "self-publishing"), the literary underground. It was his authorship of that book, published in the U.S. this week by St. Martin's Press as The Medvedev Papers, which led directly to Medvedev's forced hospitalization last year...