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The dangerous doctrines of the far right that have manifested in the past week, the past two months, and the past four years have deep historical roots in American politics, including ones that I remember from my childhood in the mid-nineteen-sixties. Though my parents weren’t big readers, they owned one particular book, published in 1964, whose severely cautionary title strikes me as a mark of the fears that they felt at the time: “Danger on the Right.” I’ve never read it; the danger, I recall hearing at the time, had something to do with the 1964 Republican Presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater, whom they considered a menace. Remembering the book recently, for obvious reasons, I discovered that it had made an impression far beyond my family circle: it gave rise to an extraordinary hour-long broadcast on WABC-TV from October of that year, near the end of the Presidential campaign (and now streaming on YouTube), titled after the book, but in the
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Imagination isnât only extravagant fantasy; itâs also a comprehensive realism, which offers a view of characters in their full spectrum of activities, and dramas in their full range of social implications. That sort of realistic imagination is what makes it possible, when filming fictional stories of the sort that seem torn from the headlines or derived from the lives of ordinary people, to combine the astonishment of journalistic investigation with intimate profundity and historical scope. The antithesis of such imagination is mere storytelling, a sort of middling informational mode of delivering drama. But thereâs a special dimension of disappointment that comes from seeing a story told with a bombastic straining at importance, leaving out its wider connections in order to force a filmmakerâs emotions into it and wring viewersâ emotional reactions out of it. Thatâs the quality that afflicts âPieces of a Womanâ (str