Word: wrongly
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...Quick and the Dead: shot dead by his dastardly dad. Jim, the Catholic schoolboy in The Basketball Diaries: nearly kills himself with heroin. At least these misfits courted disaster. The only sin of the noble DiCaprio hero in Romeo+ Juliet and Titanic is to be caught in the wrong place with the girl he loves. Has any teen idol played so many characters who end up dead? (DiCaprio's double role in The Man in the Iron Mask doesn't suit our thesis--he is pampered by four father figures and gives a soggy performance--so we'll ignore...
...first-time author at 38 and icon of literary chic by 41--it has proved as easy to demystify him as it was to crown him. "Only the bizarre or trifling really appeals to him," a school report had complained, and Chatwin habitually acted as if there was nothing wrong with the truth that a little storytelling couldn't fix. When he lost his notes in Africa, he reported that a family of monkeys had stolen them while he'd looked on, transfixed. When he contracted AIDS, he told even his closest friends that he had an "extremely rare" fungus...
...power--to remoralize a culture they believed was degenerating before their eyes--they hit a wall. Under G.O.P. congressional control, government sanctions against abortion and homosexuality have, if anything, grown weaker. And when the G.O.P. tried to rally the public against a President they believed epitomized all that was wrong in the culture, the public refused to get on board. Americans, it turned out, were becoming less morally judgmental, and government could do little about it. Conservatives might influence Washington, but Washington wasn't influencing the culture...
...lesson is that we've gone about the project of creating an American elite in the wrong order. The first step should be to generate a real national agreement about what form we want the country to take. After we've settled that, we should pick an elite that has the inclination and the ability to do what we want done. Generate an elite first--without a definite project for it to accomplish--and you will wind up with a class of leaders without followers...
...spying on your neighbor tomorrow morning. But you won't. Not because you can't, not because it's illegal, not because you're not interested; to be human is to be a busybody. You won't do it because it is beneath you. Because you know it is wrong, and you would be ashamed of yourself...