你可能感兴趣的试题

King Richard III was a monster. He poisoned his wife, stole the throne from his two young nephews and ordered them to be smothered in the Tower of London. Richard was a sort of Antichrist the King --"that bottled spider, that poisonous bunchbacked toad."
Anyway, that was Shakespeare’s version. Shakespeare did what the playwright does: he turned history into a vivid, articulate, organized dream-repeatable nightly. He put the crouchback onstage, and sold tickets.
And who would say that the real Richard known to family and friends was not identical to Shakespeare’s memorably loathsome creation The actual Richard went dimming into the past and vanished. When all the eye-witnesses are gone, the artist’s imagination begins to twist.
Variations on the King Richard Effect are at work in Oliver Stone’s JFK. Richard III was art, but it was propaganda too. Shakespeare took the details of his plot from Tudor historians who wanted to blacken Richard’s name. Several centuries passed before other historians began to write about Richard’s virtues and suggest that he may have been a victim of Tudor malice and what is the cleverest conspiracy of all: art.
JFK is a long and powerful harangue about the death of the man Stone keeps calling "the slain young king." What are the rules of Stone’s game Is Stone functioning as commercial entertainer Propagandist Documentary filmmaker Historian Journalist Fantasist Sensationalist Crazy conspiracy monger Lone hero crusading for the truth against a corrupt Establishment Answer: some of the above.
The first superficial effect of JFK is to raise angry little scruples like welts in the conscience. Wouldn’t it be absurd if a generation of younger Americans, with no memory of 1963, were to form their ideas about John Kennedy’s assassination from Oliver Stone’s report of it But worse things have happened--including, perhaps, the Warren Commission report
Stone uses a suspect, mixed art form, and JFK raises the familiar ethical and historical problems of docudrama. But so what Artists have always used public events as raw material, have taken history into their imaginations and transformed it. The fall of Troy vanished into the Iliad. The Battle of Borodino found its most memorable permanence in Tolstoy’s imagining of it in War and Peace.
Especially in a world of insatiable electronic storytelling, real history procreates, endlessly conjuring new versions of itself. Public life has become a metaphysical breeder of fictions. Watergate became an almost continuous television miniseries--although it is interesting that the movie of Woodward and Bernstein’s All The President’s Men stayed close to the known facts and, unlike JFK, did not validate dark conjecture.

For months the Japanese searched fitfully for the right word to describe what was happening. At the Bank of Japan, the nation’s central bank, officials spoke of "an adjustment phase." Prime Minister admitted only to "a difficult situation." The Economic Planning Agency, the government’s record keeper, referred delicately to a "retreat." Then two weeks ago, for the first time since 1997, the agency dropped its boilerplate reference to the "expansion, from its closely watched Monthly Economic Report, and the word game was over. Japan’s economy, the world’s second largest, conceded the experts, was in recession.
That admission confirmed the had news businessmen had been reading in their spreadsheets for several months. "In 2001 one market after another turned bad," says Yoshihiko Wakamoto, senior vice president of Toshiba Corp. , which now admits that its pretax profits for fiscal 2001, ending March 31, may be down a whopping 42%. In April, when many Japanese companies announce their results for 2001 fiscal Year, most will report declining profits. Blue chips like Sony, NEC and Matsushita have all experienced drops of over 40% in pretax profits. Japan’s security houses, hit by declining commissions from a falling stock market, will announce even more dramatic drops. Nomura Securities, once Japan’s most profitable company, is talking about an 80% decline in profits. Auto manufacturers, banks, airlines, steel companies, department stores —all are in a slump.
Technically, what is happening to the Japanese economy does not meet American criteria for a recession, normally defined as at least two consecutive quarters of negative growth. While economic growth has slowed in Japan, it has not ceased. Government economists are predicting a 3.5% increase in GNP for 2002. Outside experts are not so optimistic. But nearly everyone agrees that GNP growth in Japan is unlikely to slip into negative numbers, as it did last year in the U. S. and Britain. "There’s no question that we are in a recession," pronounces Kunio Miyamoto, chief economist of the Sumitomo-Life Research Institute. "But it is a recession, Japanese-style."
During the last half of the 1990s, Japanese companies based much of their expansion around the world on the wildly inflated values of the Tokyo Stock Exchange and Japan’s frenzied real estate market. Now both those markets have collapsed. And with long-term interest rates up from 5% to 7%, Japanese companies are less able to sell vast quantities of high-quality goods at razor-thin profit margins. Added to this are pressures from shareholders for a greater return on investments, from Japan’s trading partners for restraints on its aggressive trade practices, and from its own citizens for a reduction in their working hours so they can enjoy the fruits of 40 years of relentless toil.

King Richard III was a monster. He poisoned his wife, stole the throne from his two young nephews and ordered them to be smothered in the Tower of London. Richard was a sort of Antichrist the King --"that bottled spider, that poisonous bunchbacked toad."
Anyway, that was Shakespeare’s version. Shakespeare did what the playwright does: he turned history into a vivid, articulate, organized dream-repeatable nightly. He put the crouchback onstage, and sold tickets.
And who would say that the real Richard known to family and friends was not identical to Shakespeare’s memorably loathsome creation The actual Richard went dimming into the past and vanished. When all the eye-witnesses are gone, the artist’s imagination begins to twist.
Variations on the King Richard Effect are at work in Oliver Stone’s JFK. Richard III was art, but it was propaganda too. Shakespeare took the details of his plot from Tudor historians who wanted to blacken Richard’s name. Several centuries passed before other historians began to write about Richard’s virtues and suggest that he may have been a victim of Tudor malice and what is the cleverest conspiracy of all: art.
JFK is a long and powerful harangue about the death of the man Stone keeps calling "the slain young king." What are the rules of Stone’s game Is Stone functioning as commercial entertainer Propagandist Documentary filmmaker Historian Journalist Fantasist Sensationalist Crazy conspiracy monger Lone hero crusading for the truth against a corrupt Establishment Answer: some of the above.
The first superficial effect of JFK is to raise angry little scruples like welts in the conscience. Wouldn’t it be absurd if a generation of younger Americans, with no memory of 1963, were to form their ideas about John Kennedy’s assassination from Oliver Stone’s report of it But worse things have happened--including, perhaps, the Warren Commission report
Stone uses a suspect, mixed art form, and JFK raises the familiar ethical and historical problems of docudrama. But so what Artists have always used public events as raw material, have taken history into their imaginations and transformed it. The fall of Troy vanished into the Iliad. The Battle of Borodino found its most memorable permanence in Tolstoy’s imagining of it in War and Peace.
Especially in a world of insatiable electronic storytelling, real history procreates, endlessly conjuring new versions of itself. Public life has become a metaphysical breeder of fictions. Watergate became an almost continuous television miniseries--although it is interesting that the movie of Woodward and Bernstein’s All The President’s Men stayed close to the known facts and, unlike JFK, did not validate dark conjecture.

Ever since they were first staged in 19th century Europe, world’s fairs have enabled people from around the globe to visit wondrous pavilions where they can discover distant lands and new technologies. The 2006 world’s fair is no exception, but it also has a decidedly new-era twist: the whole event happens in cyberspace.
A nonprofit project dreamed up by Americans Carl Malamud, a computer consultant, and Vinton Cerf, and Internet pioneer and telecommunications company Vice president, the Internet 2006 World Exposition is a digital work in progress, a multi-chambered forum that cybernauts can help build and renovate throughout the year--and perhaps long after the fair’s official close in December.
While high-tech pavilions set up by sponsoring corporations are featured prominently, as in real fairs, this virtual exposition is closer in spirit and reality to a vast bustling bazaar, a marketplace for the talents and offerings of thousands of individuals and small groups. Anyone with a computer and a modem can not only "attend" but also participate as an exhibitor by creating an individual multimedia Website.
Getting the fair up and running was by no means easy. Malamud, 36, spent the past year shuttling among 30 countries, lobbying companies that initially dismissed the project as unwieldy and unworkable. While some nations immediately supported the idea, others completely missed the point of Malamud’s vision: to make the fair a public-works project that focuses on what the Internet can offer expert or novice. Once grass-roots groups started backing the project, though, businesses were not far behind. By donating equipment and services, these companies will gain access to millions of potential consumers eager to see the firms’ latest technologies.
Since the exposition’s Jan. 1 launch, as many as 40,000 visitors each day from more than 40 countries have tried the major Websites. Most virtual visitors log on from the U. S and Japan, but the United Arab Emirates, Sweden, Singapore and Estonia have been represented. Comments logged in the fair’s guest book are overwhelmingly positive. "Wow, the world is shrinking," wrote a visitor from the Netherlands. Since their initial hesitancy, the major sponsors-primarily telecommunications and software companies--have become firm believers. Beyond the diversity of content and international scope, the fair is a technological marvel.
The fastest international link ever installed, this pipeline could be the first step toward laying a permanent network that will eventually hardwire every nation in the world into the Internet. The organizers hope that the infrastructure--and awareness-nurtured by this exposition will launch a boom in Net use.

It was the best of times or, depending on your political and philosophical outlook, one of the foulest and most depraved. Rebellion seemed to be leaping from city to city, continent to continent, by some fiery process of contagion. Radical students filled the streets of Mexico city, Berlin, Tokyo, Prague. In the U. S. , Chicago swirled into near anarchy as cops battled antiwar demonstrators gathered at the Democratic Convention. And everywhere from Amsterdam to Haight-Ashbury, a generation was getting high, acting up.
So, clearly, it was the year from hell—a collective "dive into extensive social and personal dysfunction," as the Wall Street Journal editorialized recently. Or, depending again on your outlook, a global breakthrough for the human spirit. On this, the 25th anniversary of 1968, probably the only thing we can all agree on is that 68 marks the beginning of the "culture wars," which have divided America ever since.
Both the sides of the "culture wars" of the ’80s and ’90s took form in the critical year of ’68. The key issues are different now abortion and gay rights, for example, as opposed to Vietnam and racism--but the underlying themes still echo the clashes of ’68: Diversity vs. conformity, tradition vs. iconoclasm, self-expression vs. deference to norms. "Question authority," in other words, vs. "Father knows best."
The 25th anniversary of ’68 is a good time to reflect, calmly and philosophically, on these deep, underlying choices. On one hand we know that anti--authoritarianism for its own sake easily degenerates into a rude and unfocused defiance: Revolution, as Abbie Hoffman put it, "for the hell of it." Certainly ’68 had its wretched excesses as well as its moments of glory: the personal tragedy of lives undone by drugs and sex, the heavy cost of riots and destruction. One might easily conclude that the ancient rules and hierarchies are there for a reason--they’re worked, more or less, for untold millenniums, so there’s no point in changing them now.
But it’s also true that what "worked" for thousands of years may not be the best way of doing things. Democracy, after all, was once a far-out, subversive notion, condemned by kings and priests. In our own country, it took all kinds of hell-raising, including a war, to get across the simple notion that no person is morally entitled to own another. One generation’s hallowed tradition--slavery, or the divine right of kings--may be another generation’s object lesson in human folly.
’68 was one more awkward, stumbling, half step forward in what Dutschke called the "long march" toward human freedom. Actually, it helped inspire the worldwide feminist movement.

For months the Japanese searched fitfully for the right word to describe what was happening. At the Bank of Japan, the nation’s central bank, officials spoke of "an adjustment phase." Prime Minister admitted only to "a difficult situation." The Economic Planning Agency, the government’s record keeper, referred delicately to a "retreat." Then two weeks ago, for the first time since 1997, the agency dropped its boilerplate reference to the "expansion, from its closely watched Monthly Economic Report, and the word game was over. Japan’s economy, the world’s second largest, conceded the experts, was in recession.
That admission confirmed the had news businessmen had been reading in their spreadsheets for several months. "In 2001 one market after another turned bad," says Yoshihiko Wakamoto, senior vice president of Toshiba Corp. , which now admits that its pretax profits for fiscal 2001, ending March 31, may be down a whopping 42%. In April, when many Japanese companies announce their results for 2001 fiscal Year, most will report declining profits. Blue chips like Sony, NEC and Matsushita have all experienced drops of over 40% in pretax profits. Japan’s security houses, hit by declining commissions from a falling stock market, will announce even more dramatic drops. Nomura Securities, once Japan’s most profitable company, is talking about an 80% decline in profits. Auto manufacturers, banks, airlines, steel companies, department stores —all are in a slump.
Technically, what is happening to the Japanese economy does not meet American criteria for a recession, normally defined as at least two consecutive quarters of negative growth. While economic growth has slowed in Japan, it has not ceased. Government economists are predicting a 3.5% increase in GNP for 2002. Outside experts are not so optimistic. But nearly everyone agrees that GNP growth in Japan is unlikely to slip into negative numbers, as it did last year in the U. S. and Britain. "There’s no question that we are in a recession," pronounces Kunio Miyamoto, chief economist of the Sumitomo-Life Research Institute. "But it is a recession, Japanese-style."
During the last half of the 1990s, Japanese companies based much of their expansion around the world on the wildly inflated values of the Tokyo Stock Exchange and Japan’s frenzied real estate market. Now both those markets have collapsed. And with long-term interest rates up from 5% to 7%, Japanese companies are less able to sell vast quantities of high-quality goods at razor-thin profit margins. Added to this are pressures from shareholders for a greater return on investments, from Japan’s trading partners for restraints on its aggressive trade practices, and from its own citizens for a reduction in their working hours so they can enjoy the fruits of 40 years of relentless toil.

Ever since they were first staged in 19th century Europe, world’s fairs have enabled people from around the globe to visit wondrous pavilions where they can discover distant lands and new technologies. The 2006 world’s fair is no exception, but it also has a decidedly new-era twist: the whole event happens in cyberspace.
A nonprofit project dreamed up by Americans Carl Malamud, a computer consultant, and Vinton Cerf, and Internet pioneer and telecommunications company Vice president, the Internet 2006 World Exposition is a digital work in progress, a multi-chambered forum that cybernauts can help build and renovate throughout the year--and perhaps long after the fair’s official close in December.
While high-tech pavilions set up by sponsoring corporations are featured prominently, as in real fairs, this virtual exposition is closer in spirit and reality to a vast bustling bazaar, a marketplace for the talents and offerings of thousands of individuals and small groups. Anyone with a computer and a modem can not only "attend" but also participate as an exhibitor by creating an individual multimedia Website.
Getting the fair up and running was by no means easy. Malamud, 36, spent the past year shuttling among 30 countries, lobbying companies that initially dismissed the project as unwieldy and unworkable. While some nations immediately supported the idea, others completely missed the point of Malamud’s vision: to make the fair a public-works project that focuses on what the Internet can offer expert or novice. Once grass-roots groups started backing the project, though, businesses were not far behind. By donating equipment and services, these companies will gain access to millions of potential consumers eager to see the firms’ latest technologies.
Since the exposition’s Jan. 1 launch, as many as 40,000 visitors each day from more than 40 countries have tried the major Websites. Most virtual visitors log on from the U. S and Japan, but the United Arab Emirates, Sweden, Singapore and Estonia have been represented. Comments logged in the fair’s guest book are overwhelmingly positive. "Wow, the world is shrinking," wrote a visitor from the Netherlands. Since their initial hesitancy, the major sponsors-primarily telecommunications and software companies--have become firm believers. Beyond the diversity of content and international scope, the fair is a technological marvel.
The fastest international link ever installed, this pipeline could be the first step toward laying a permanent network that will eventually hardwire every nation in the world into the Internet. The organizers hope that the infrastructure--and awareness-nurtured by this exposition will launch a boom in Net use.

It was the best of times or, depending on your political and philosophical outlook, one of the foulest and most depraved. Rebellion seemed to be leaping from city to city, continent to continent, by some fiery process of contagion. Radical students filled the streets of Mexico city, Berlin, Tokyo, Prague. In the U. S. , Chicago swirled into near anarchy as cops battled antiwar demonstrators gathered at the Democratic Convention. And everywhere from Amsterdam to Haight-Ashbury, a generation was getting high, acting up.
So, clearly, it was the year from hell—a collective "dive into extensive social and personal dysfunction," as the Wall Street Journal editorialized recently. Or, depending again on your outlook, a global breakthrough for the human spirit. On this, the 25th anniversary of 1968, probably the only thing we can all agree on is that 68 marks the beginning of the "culture wars," which have divided America ever since.
Both the sides of the "culture wars" of the ’80s and ’90s took form in the critical year of ’68. The key issues are different now abortion and gay rights, for example, as opposed to Vietnam and racism--but the underlying themes still echo the clashes of ’68: Diversity vs. conformity, tradition vs. iconoclasm, self-expression vs. deference to norms. "Question authority," in other words, vs. "Father knows best."
The 25th anniversary of ’68 is a good time to reflect, calmly and philosophically, on these deep, underlying choices. On one hand we know that anti--authoritarianism for its own sake easily degenerates into a rude and unfocused defiance: Revolution, as Abbie Hoffman put it, "for the hell of it." Certainly ’68 had its wretched excesses as well as its moments of glory: the personal tragedy of lives undone by drugs and sex, the heavy cost of riots and destruction. One might easily conclude that the ancient rules and hierarchies are there for a reason--they’re worked, more or less, for untold millenniums, so there’s no point in changing them now.
But it’s also true that what "worked" for thousands of years may not be the best way of doing things. Democracy, after all, was once a far-out, subversive notion, condemned by kings and priests. In our own country, it took all kinds of hell-raising, including a war, to get across the simple notion that no person is morally entitled to own another. One generation’s hallowed tradition--slavery, or the divine right of kings--may be another generation’s object lesson in human folly.
’68 was one more awkward, stumbling, half step forward in what Dutschke called the "long march" toward human freedom. Actually, it helped inspire the worldwide feminist movement.

King Richard III was a monster. He poisoned his wife, stole the throne from his two young nephews and ordered them to be smothered in the Tower of London. Richard was a sort of Antichrist the King --"that bottled spider, that poisonous bunchbacked toad."
Anyway, that was Shakespeare’s version. Shakespeare did what the playwright does: he turned history into a vivid, articulate, organized dream-repeatable nightly. He put the crouchback onstage, and sold tickets.
And who would say that the real Richard known to family and friends was not identical to Shakespeare’s memorably loathsome creation The actual Richard went dimming into the past and vanished. When all the eye-witnesses are gone, the artist’s imagination begins to twist.
Variations on the King Richard Effect are at work in Oliver Stone’s JFK. Richard III was art, but it was propaganda too. Shakespeare took the details of his plot from Tudor historians who wanted to blacken Richard’s name. Several centuries passed before other historians began to write about Richard’s virtues and suggest that he may have been a victim of Tudor malice and what is the cleverest conspiracy of all: art.
JFK is a long and powerful harangue about the death of the man Stone keeps calling "the slain young king." What are the rules of Stone’s game Is Stone functioning as commercial entertainer Propagandist Documentary filmmaker Historian Journalist Fantasist Sensationalist Crazy conspiracy monger Lone hero crusading for the truth against a corrupt Establishment Answer: some of the above.
The first superficial effect of JFK is to raise angry little scruples like welts in the conscience. Wouldn’t it be absurd if a generation of younger Americans, with no memory of 1963, were to form their ideas about John Kennedy’s assassination from Oliver Stone’s report of it But worse things have happened--including, perhaps, the Warren Commission report
Stone uses a suspect, mixed art form, and JFK raises the familiar ethical and historical problems of docudrama. But so what Artists have always used public events as raw material, have taken history into their imaginations and transformed it. The fall of Troy vanished into the Iliad. The Battle of Borodino found its most memorable permanence in Tolstoy’s imagining of it in War and Peace.
Especially in a world of insatiable electronic storytelling, real history procreates, endlessly conjuring new versions of itself. Public life has become a metaphysical breeder of fictions. Watergate became an almost continuous television miniseries--although it is interesting that the movie of Woodward and Bernstein’s All The President’s Men stayed close to the known facts and, unlike JFK, did not validate dark conjecture.

For months the Japanese searched fitfully for the right word to describe what was happening. At the Bank of Japan, the nation’s central bank, officials spoke of "an adjustment phase." Prime Minister admitted only to "a difficult situation." The Economic Planning Agency, the government’s record keeper, referred delicately to a "retreat." Then two weeks ago, for the first time since 1997, the agency dropped its boilerplate reference to the "expansion, from its closely watched Monthly Economic Report, and the word game was over. Japan’s economy, the world’s second largest, conceded the experts, was in recession.
That admission confirmed the had news businessmen had been reading in their spreadsheets for several months. "In 2001 one market after another turned bad," says Yoshihiko Wakamoto, senior vice president of Toshiba Corp. , which now admits that its pretax profits for fiscal 2001, ending March 31, may be down a whopping 42%. In April, when many Japanese companies announce their results for 2001 fiscal Year, most will report declining profits. Blue chips like Sony, NEC and Matsushita have all experienced drops of over 40% in pretax profits. Japan’s security houses, hit by declining commissions from a falling stock market, will announce even more dramatic drops. Nomura Securities, once Japan’s most profitable company, is talking about an 80% decline in profits. Auto manufacturers, banks, airlines, steel companies, department stores —all are in a slump.
Technically, what is happening to the Japanese economy does not meet American criteria for a recession, normally defined as at least two consecutive quarters of negative growth. While economic growth has slowed in Japan, it has not ceased. Government economists are predicting a 3.5% increase in GNP for 2002. Outside experts are not so optimistic. But nearly everyone agrees that GNP growth in Japan is unlikely to slip into negative numbers, as it did last year in the U. S. and Britain. "There’s no question that we are in a recession," pronounces Kunio Miyamoto, chief economist of the Sumitomo-Life Research Institute. "But it is a recession, Japanese-style."
During the last half of the 1990s, Japanese companies based much of their expansion around the world on the wildly inflated values of the Tokyo Stock Exchange and Japan’s frenzied real estate market. Now both those markets have collapsed. And with long-term interest rates up from 5% to 7%, Japanese companies are less able to sell vast quantities of high-quality goods at razor-thin profit margins. Added to this are pressures from shareholders for a greater return on investments, from Japan’s trading partners for restraints on its aggressive trade practices, and from its own citizens for a reduction in their working hours so they can enjoy the fruits of 40 years of relentless toil.

Ever since they were first staged in 19th century Europe, world’s fairs have enabled people from around the globe to visit wondrous pavilions where they can discover distant lands and new technologies. The 2006 world’s fair is no exception, but it also has a decidedly new-era twist: the whole event happens in cyberspace.
A nonprofit project dreamed up by Americans Carl Malamud, a computer consultant, and Vinton Cerf, and Internet pioneer and telecommunications company Vice president, the Internet 2006 World Exposition is a digital work in progress, a multi-chambered forum that cybernauts can help build and renovate throughout the year--and perhaps long after the fair’s official close in December.
While high-tech pavilions set up by sponsoring corporations are featured prominently, as in real fairs, this virtual exposition is closer in spirit and reality to a vast bustling bazaar, a marketplace for the talents and offerings of thousands of individuals and small groups. Anyone with a computer and a modem can not only "attend" but also participate as an exhibitor by creating an individual multimedia Website.
Getting the fair up and running was by no means easy. Malamud, 36, spent the past year shuttling among 30 countries, lobbying companies that initially dismissed the project as unwieldy and unworkable. While some nations immediately supported the idea, others completely missed the point of Malamud’s vision: to make the fair a public-works project that focuses on what the Internet can offer expert or novice. Once grass-roots groups started backing the project, though, businesses were not far behind. By donating equipment and services, these companies will gain access to millions of potential consumers eager to see the firms’ latest technologies.
Since the exposition’s Jan. 1 launch, as many as 40,000 visitors each day from more than 40 countries have tried the major Websites. Most virtual visitors log on from the U. S and Japan, but the United Arab Emirates, Sweden, Singapore and Estonia have been represented. Comments logged in the fair’s guest book are overwhelmingly positive. "Wow, the world is shrinking," wrote a visitor from the Netherlands. Since their initial hesitancy, the major sponsors-primarily telecommunications and software companies--have become firm believers. Beyond the diversity of content and international scope, the fair is a technological marvel.
The fastest international link ever installed, this pipeline could be the first step toward laying a permanent network that will eventually hardwire every nation in the world into the Internet. The organizers hope that the infrastructure--and awareness-nurtured by this exposition will launch a boom in Net use.

It was the best of times or, depending on your political and philosophical outlook, one of the foulest and most depraved. Rebellion seemed to be leaping from city to city, continent to continent, by some fiery process of contagion. Radical students filled the streets of Mexico city, Berlin, Tokyo, Prague. In the U. S. , Chicago swirled into near anarchy as cops battled antiwar demonstrators gathered at the Democratic Convention. And everywhere from Amsterdam to Haight-Ashbury, a generation was getting high, acting up.
So, clearly, it was the year from hell—a collective "dive into extensive social and personal dysfunction," as the Wall Street Journal editorialized recently. Or, depending again on your outlook, a global breakthrough for the human spirit. On this, the 25th anniversary of 1968, probably the only thing we can all agree on is that 68 marks the beginning of the "culture wars," which have divided America ever since.
Both the sides of the "culture wars" of the ’80s and ’90s took form in the critical year of ’68. The key issues are different now abortion and gay rights, for example, as opposed to Vietnam and racism--but the underlying themes still echo the clashes of ’68: Diversity vs. conformity, tradition vs. iconoclasm, self-expression vs. deference to norms. "Question authority," in other words, vs. "Father knows best."
The 25th anniversary of ’68 is a good time to reflect, calmly and philosophically, on these deep, underlying choices. On one hand we know that anti--authoritarianism for its own sake easily degenerates into a rude and unfocused defiance: Revolution, as Abbie Hoffman put it, "for the hell of it." Certainly ’68 had its wretched excesses as well as its moments of glory: the personal tragedy of lives undone by drugs and sex, the heavy cost of riots and destruction. One might easily conclude that the ancient rules and hierarchies are there for a reason--they’re worked, more or less, for untold millenniums, so there’s no point in changing them now.
But it’s also true that what "worked" for thousands of years may not be the best way of doing things. Democracy, after all, was once a far-out, subversive notion, condemned by kings and priests. In our own country, it took all kinds of hell-raising, including a war, to get across the simple notion that no person is morally entitled to own another. One generation’s hallowed tradition--slavery, or the divine right of kings--may be another generation’s object lesson in human folly.
’68 was one more awkward, stumbling, half step forward in what Dutschke called the "long march" toward human freedom. Actually, it helped inspire the worldwide feminist movement.

King Richard III was a monster. He poisoned his wife, stole the throne from his two young nephews and ordered them to be smothered in the Tower of London. Richard was a sort of Antichrist the King --"that bottled spider, that poisonous bunchbacked toad."
Anyway, that was Shakespeare’s version. Shakespeare did what the playwright does: he turned history into a vivid, articulate, organized dream-repeatable nightly. He put the crouchback onstage, and sold tickets.
And who would say that the real Richard known to family and friends was not identical to Shakespeare’s memorably loathsome creation The actual Richard went dimming into the past and vanished. When all the eye-witnesses are gone, the artist’s imagination begins to twist.
Variations on the King Richard Effect are at work in Oliver Stone’s JFK. Richard III was art, but it was propaganda too. Shakespeare took the details of his plot from Tudor historians who wanted to blacken Richard’s name. Several centuries passed before other historians began to write about Richard’s virtues and suggest that he may have been a victim of Tudor malice and what is the cleverest conspiracy of all: art.
JFK is a long and powerful harangue about the death of the man Stone keeps calling "the slain young king." What are the rules of Stone’s game Is Stone functioning as commercial entertainer Propagandist Documentary filmmaker Historian Journalist Fantasist Sensationalist Crazy conspiracy monger Lone hero crusading for the truth against a corrupt Establishment Answer: some of the above.
The first superficial effect of JFK is to raise angry little scruples like welts in the conscience. Wouldn’t it be absurd if a generation of younger Americans, with no memory of 1963, were to form their ideas about John Kennedy’s assassination from Oliver Stone’s report of it But worse things have happened--including, perhaps, the Warren Commission report
Stone uses a suspect, mixed art form, and JFK raises the familiar ethical and historical problems of docudrama. But so what Artists have always used public events as raw material, have taken history into their imaginations and transformed it. The fall of Troy vanished into the Iliad. The Battle of Borodino found its most memorable permanence in Tolstoy’s imagining of it in War and Peace.
Especially in a world of insatiable electronic storytelling, real history procreates, endlessly conjuring new versions of itself. Public life has become a metaphysical breeder of fictions. Watergate became an almost continuous television miniseries--although it is interesting that the movie of Woodward and Bernstein’s All The President’s Men stayed close to the known facts and, unlike JFK, did not validate dark conjecture.

For months the Japanese searched fitfully for the right word to describe what was happening. At the Bank of Japan, the nation’s central bank, officials spoke of "an adjustment phase." Prime Minister admitted only to "a difficult situation." The Economic Planning Agency, the government’s record keeper, referred delicately to a "retreat." Then two weeks ago, for the first time since 1997, the agency dropped its boilerplate reference to the "expansion, from its closely watched Monthly Economic Report, and the word game was over. Japan’s economy, the world’s second largest, conceded the experts, was in recession.
That admission confirmed the had news businessmen had been reading in their spreadsheets for several months. "In 2001 one market after another turned bad," says Yoshihiko Wakamoto, senior vice president of Toshiba Corp. , which now admits that its pretax profits for fiscal 2001, ending March 31, may be down a whopping 42%. In April, when many Japanese companies announce their results for 2001 fiscal Year, most will report declining profits. Blue chips like Sony, NEC and Matsushita have all experienced drops of over 40% in pretax profits. Japan’s security houses, hit by declining commissions from a falling stock market, will announce even more dramatic drops. Nomura Securities, once Japan’s most profitable company, is talking about an 80% decline in profits. Auto manufacturers, banks, airlines, steel companies, department stores —all are in a slump.
Technically, what is happening to the Japanese economy does not meet American criteria for a recession, normally defined as at least two consecutive quarters of negative growth. While economic growth has slowed in Japan, it has not ceased. Government economists are predicting a 3.5% increase in GNP for 2002. Outside experts are not so optimistic. But nearly everyone agrees that GNP growth in Japan is unlikely to slip into negative numbers, as it did last year in the U. S. and Britain. "There’s no question that we are in a recession," pronounces Kunio Miyamoto, chief economist of the Sumitomo-Life Research Institute. "But it is a recession, Japanese-style."
During the last half of the 1990s, Japanese companies based much of their expansion around the world on the wildly inflated values of the Tokyo Stock Exchange and Japan’s frenzied real estate market. Now both those markets have collapsed. And with long-term interest rates up from 5% to 7%, Japanese companies are less able to sell vast quantities of high-quality goods at razor-thin profit margins. Added to this are pressures from shareholders for a greater return on investments, from Japan’s trading partners for restraints on its aggressive trade practices, and from its own citizens for a reduction in their working hours so they can enjoy the fruits of 40 years of relentless toil.

Ever since they were first staged in 19th century Europe, world’s fairs have enabled people from around the globe to visit wondrous pavilions where they can discover distant lands and new technologies. The 2006 world’s fair is no exception, but it also has a decidedly new-era twist: the whole event happens in cyberspace.
A nonprofit project dreamed up by Americans Carl Malamud, a computer consultant, and Vinton Cerf, and Internet pioneer and telecommunications company Vice president, the Internet 2006 World Exposition is a digital work in progress, a multi-chambered forum that cybernauts can help build and renovate throughout the year--and perhaps long after the fair’s official close in December.
While high-tech pavilions set up by sponsoring corporations are featured prominently, as in real fairs, this virtual exposition is closer in spirit and reality to a vast bustling bazaar, a marketplace for the talents and offerings of thousands of individuals and small groups. Anyone with a computer and a modem can not only "attend" but also participate as an exhibitor by creating an individual multimedia Website.
Getting the fair up and running was by no means easy. Malamud, 36, spent the past year shuttling among 30 countries, lobbying companies that initially dismissed the project as unwieldy and unworkable. While some nations immediately supported the idea, others completely missed the point of Malamud’s vision: to make the fair a public-works project that focuses on what the Internet can offer expert or novice. Once grass-roots groups started backing the project, though, businesses were not far behind. By donating equipment and services, these companies will gain access to millions of potential consumers eager to see the firms’ latest technologies.
Since the exposition’s Jan. 1 launch, as many as 40,000 visitors each day from more than 40 countries have tried the major Websites. Most virtual visitors log on from the U. S and Japan, but the United Arab Emirates, Sweden, Singapore and Estonia have been represented. Comments logged in the fair’s guest book are overwhelmingly positive. "Wow, the world is shrinking," wrote a visitor from the Netherlands. Since their initial hesitancy, the major sponsors-primarily telecommunications and software companies--have become firm believers. Beyond the diversity of content and international scope, the fair is a technological marvel.
The fastest international link ever installed, this pipeline could be the first step toward laying a permanent network that will eventually hardwire every nation in the world into the Internet. The organizers hope that the infrastructure--and awareness-nurtured by this exposition will launch a boom in Net use.

It was the best of times or, depending on your political and philosophical outlook, one of the foulest and most depraved. Rebellion seemed to be leaping from city to city, continent to continent, by some fiery process of contagion. Radical students filled the streets of Mexico city, Berlin, Tokyo, Prague. In the U. S. , Chicago swirled into near anarchy as cops battled antiwar demonstrators gathered at the Democratic Convention. And everywhere from Amsterdam to Haight-Ashbury, a generation was getting high, acting up.
So, clearly, it was the year from hell—a collective "dive into extensive social and personal dysfunction," as the Wall Street Journal editorialized recently. Or, depending again on your outlook, a global breakthrough for the human spirit. On this, the 25th anniversary of 1968, probably the only thing we can all agree on is that 68 marks the beginning of the "culture wars," which have divided America ever since.
Both the sides of the "culture wars" of the ’80s and ’90s took form in the critical year of ’68. The key issues are different now abortion and gay rights, for example, as opposed to Vietnam and racism--but the underlying themes still echo the clashes of ’68: Diversity vs. conformity, tradition vs. iconoclasm, self-expression vs. deference to norms. "Question authority," in other words, vs. "Father knows best."
The 25th anniversary of ’68 is a good time to reflect, calmly and philosophically, on these deep, underlying choices. On one hand we know that anti--authoritarianism for its own sake easily degenerates into a rude and unfocused defiance: Revolution, as Abbie Hoffman put it, "for the hell of it." Certainly ’68 had its wretched excesses as well as its moments of glory: the personal tragedy of lives undone by drugs and sex, the heavy cost of riots and destruction. One might easily conclude that the ancient rules and hierarchies are there for a reason--they’re worked, more or less, for untold millenniums, so there’s no point in changing them now.
But it’s also true that what "worked" for thousands of years may not be the best way of doing things. Democracy, after all, was once a far-out, subversive notion, condemned by kings and priests. In our own country, it took all kinds of hell-raising, including a war, to get across the simple notion that no person is morally entitled to own another. One generation’s hallowed tradition--slavery, or the divine right of kings--may be another generation’s object lesson in human folly.
’68 was one more awkward, stumbling, half step forward in what Dutschke called the "long march" toward human freedom. Actually, it helped inspire the worldwide feminist movement.

King Richard III was a monster. He poisoned his wife, stole the throne from his two young nephews and ordered them to be smothered in the Tower of London. Richard was a sort of Antichrist the King --"that bottled spider, that poisonous bunchbacked toad."
Anyway, that was Shakespeare’s version. Shakespeare did what the playwright does: he turned history into a vivid, articulate, organized dream-repeatable nightly. He put the crouchback onstage, and sold tickets.
And who would say that the real Richard known to family and friends was not identical to Shakespeare’s memorably loathsome creation The actual Richard went dimming into the past and vanished. When all the eye-witnesses are gone, the artist’s imagination begins to twist.
Variations on the King Richard Effect are at work in Oliver Stone’s JFK. Richard III was art, but it was propaganda too. Shakespeare took the details of his plot from Tudor historians who wanted to blacken Richard’s name. Several centuries passed before other historians began to write about Richard’s virtues and suggest that he may have been a victim of Tudor malice and what is the cleverest conspiracy of all: art.
JFK is a long and powerful harangue about the death of the man Stone keeps calling "the slain young king." What are the rules of Stone’s game Is Stone functioning as commercial entertainer Propagandist Documentary filmmaker Historian Journalist Fantasist Sensationalist Crazy conspiracy monger Lone hero crusading for the truth against a corrupt Establishment Answer: some of the above.
The first superficial effect of JFK is to raise angry little scruples like welts in the conscience. Wouldn’t it be absurd if a generation of younger Americans, with no memory of 1963, were to form their ideas about John Kennedy’s assassination from Oliver Stone’s report of it But worse things have happened--including, perhaps, the Warren Commission report
Stone uses a suspect, mixed art form, and JFK raises the familiar ethical and historical problems of docudrama. But so what Artists have always used public events as raw material, have taken history into their imaginations and transformed it. The fall of Troy vanished into the Iliad. The Battle of Borodino found its most memorable permanence in Tolstoy’s imagining of it in War and Peace.
Especially in a world of insatiable electronic storytelling, real history procreates, endlessly conjuring new versions of itself. Public life has become a metaphysical breeder of fictions. Watergate became an almost continuous television miniseries--although it is interesting that the movie of Woodward and Bernstein’s All The President’s Men stayed close to the known facts and, unlike JFK, did not validate dark conjecture.

For months the Japanese searched fitfully for the right word to describe what was happening. At the Bank of Japan, the nation’s central bank, officials spoke of "an adjustment phase." Prime Minister admitted only to "a difficult situation." The Economic Planning Agency, the government’s record keeper, referred delicately to a "retreat." Then two weeks ago, for the first time since 1997, the agency dropped its boilerplate reference to the "expansion, from its closely watched Monthly Economic Report, and the word game was over. Japan’s economy, the world’s second largest, conceded the experts, was in recession.
That admission confirmed the had news businessmen had been reading in their spreadsheets for several months. "In 2001 one market after another turned bad," says Yoshihiko Wakamoto, senior vice president of Toshiba Corp. , which now admits that its pretax profits for fiscal 2001, ending March 31, may be down a whopping 42%. In April, when many Japanese companies announce their results for 2001 fiscal Year, most will report declining profits. Blue chips like Sony, NEC and Matsushita have all experienced drops of over 40% in pretax profits. Japan’s security houses, hit by declining commissions from a falling stock market, will announce even more dramatic drops. Nomura Securities, once Japan’s most profitable company, is talking about an 80% decline in profits. Auto manufacturers, banks, airlines, steel companies, department stores —all are in a slump.
Technically, what is happening to the Japanese economy does not meet American criteria for a recession, normally defined as at least two consecutive quarters of negative growth. While economic growth has slowed in Japan, it has not ceased. Government economists are predicting a 3.5% increase in GNP for 2002. Outside experts are not so optimistic. But nearly everyone agrees that GNP growth in Japan is unlikely to slip into negative numbers, as it did last year in the U. S. and Britain. "There’s no question that we are in a recession," pronounces Kunio Miyamoto, chief economist of the Sumitomo-Life Research Institute. "But it is a recession, Japanese-style."
During the last half of the 1990s, Japanese companies based much of their expansion around the world on the wildly inflated values of the Tokyo Stock Exchange and Japan’s frenzied real estate market. Now both those markets have collapsed. And with long-term interest rates up from 5% to 7%, Japanese companies are less able to sell vast quantities of high-quality goods at razor-thin profit margins. Added to this are pressures from shareholders for a greater return on investments, from Japan’s trading partners for restraints on its aggressive trade practices, and from its own citizens for a reduction in their working hours so they can enjoy the fruits of 40 years of relentless toil.

Ever since they were first staged in 19th century Europe, world’s fairs have enabled people from around the globe to visit wondrous pavilions where they can discover distant lands and new technologies. The 2006 world’s fair is no exception, but it also has a decidedly new-era twist: the whole event happens in cyberspace.
A nonprofit project dreamed up by Americans Carl Malamud, a computer consultant, and Vinton Cerf, and Internet pioneer and telecommunications company Vice president, the Internet 2006 World Exposition is a digital work in progress, a multi-chambered forum that cybernauts can help build and renovate throughout the year--and perhaps long after the fair’s official close in December.
While high-tech pavilions set up by sponsoring corporations are featured prominently, as in real fairs, this virtual exposition is closer in spirit and reality to a vast bustling bazaar, a marketplace for the talents and offerings of thousands of individuals and small groups. Anyone with a computer and a modem can not only "attend" but also participate as an exhibitor by creating an individual multimedia Website.
Getting the fair up and running was by no means easy. Malamud, 36, spent the past year shuttling among 30 countries, lobbying companies that initially dismissed the project as unwieldy and unworkable. While some nations immediately supported the idea, others completely missed the point of Malamud’s vision: to make the fair a public-works project that focuses on what the Internet can offer expert or novice. Once grass-roots groups started backing the project, though, businesses were not far behind. By donating equipment and services, these companies will gain access to millions of potential consumers eager to see the firms’ latest technologies.
Since the exposition’s Jan. 1 launch, as many as 40,000 visitors each day from more than 40 countries have tried the major Websites. Most virtual visitors log on from the U. S and Japan, but the United Arab Emirates, Sweden, Singapore and Estonia have been represented. Comments logged in the fair’s guest book are overwhelmingly positive. "Wow, the world is shrinking," wrote a visitor from the Netherlands. Since their initial hesitancy, the major sponsors-primarily telecommunications and software companies--have become firm believers. Beyond the diversity of content and international scope, the fair is a technological marvel.
The fastest international link ever installed, this pipeline could be the first step toward laying a permanent network that will eventually hardwire every nation in the world into the Internet. The organizers hope that the infrastructure--and awareness-nurtured by this exposition will launch a boom in Net use.

It was the best of times or, depending on your political and philosophical outlook, one of the foulest and most depraved. Rebellion seemed to be leaping from city to city, continent to continent, by some fiery process of contagion. Radical students filled the streets of Mexico city, Berlin, Tokyo, Prague. In the U. S. , Chicago swirled into near anarchy as cops battled antiwar demonstrators gathered at the Democratic Convention. And everywhere from Amsterdam to Haight-Ashbury, a generation was getting high, acting up.
So, clearly, it was the year from hell—a collective "dive into extensive social and personal dysfunction," as the Wall Street Journal editorialized recently. Or, depending again on your outlook, a global breakthrough for the human spirit. On this, the 25th anniversary of 1968, probably the only thing we can all agree on is that 68 marks the beginning of the "culture wars," which have divided America ever since.
Both the sides of the "culture wars" of the ’80s and ’90s took form in the critical year of ’68. The key issues are different now abortion and gay rights, for example, as opposed to Vietnam and racism--but the underlying themes still echo the clashes of ’68: Diversity vs. conformity, tradition vs. iconoclasm, self-expression vs. deference to norms. "Question authority," in other words, vs. "Father knows best."
The 25th anniversary of ’68 is a good time to reflect, calmly and philosophically, on these deep, underlying choices. On one hand we know that anti--authoritarianism for its own sake easily degenerates into a rude and unfocused defiance: Revolution, as Abbie Hoffman put it, "for the hell of it." Certainly ’68 had its wretched excesses as well as its moments of glory: the personal tragedy of lives undone by drugs and sex, the heavy cost of riots and destruction. One might easily conclude that the ancient rules and hierarchies are there for a reason--they’re worked, more or less, for untold millenniums, so there’s no point in changing them now.
But it’s also true that what "worked" for thousands of years may not be the best way of doing things. Democracy, after all, was once a far-out, subversive notion, condemned by kings and priests. In our own country, it took all kinds of hell-raising, including a war, to get across the simple notion that no person is morally entitled to own another. One generation’s hallowed tradition--slavery, or the divine right of kings--may be another generation’s object lesson in human folly.
’68 was one more awkward, stumbling, half step forward in what Dutschke called the "long march" toward human freedom. Actually, it helped inspire the worldwide feminist movement.