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| terrible and, what is worst of all, right in its perfection. The beauty of mass death. Of scenes of battle, bombed-out cities, the dead and dying littering blasted fields: the beauty of the immense pity we feel, the sense of waste. The beauty of the end of the world, as we, or rather as Hollywood imagines it, for us, over and over again. At the end, I leave the theater with a peculiar feeling of clearheadedness, satisfaction, relief. So - that is that.) Aristotle distinguished pride (which he considered generally a good thing to have, although it depended on who had it: "a good man should be proud, a bad man should not be") from arrogance, or pride's excess. Our own attitude to pride (we called it "ego") is conflicted: we consider it acceptable only for the oppressed to be proud and say so ("Gay  | Pride," "Black Pride," etc.) - in other words, when it is cosmetic and poses no threat - but obnoxious elsewhere ("False modesty is better than no modesty at all," to quote a popular polit-ical commentator). To "have a big ego" is one of the few things where bigness is not considered a virtue. The ugliness of pride: when it allows of no identification with itself. Ego: the "I" that allows no "you." We are dismissed without a hearing, the door shuts in our face, we are scorned, treated as if non-existent, "disappeared" before our own eyes. It is a brisk, little assassination, not of ourselves, but of our significance: we are allowed to linger on, in the misery of our beggary and humiliation. The eyes swivel across the room, pass through us without a flicker or at most the memory of a sneer: we are turned into ghosts of  | |||
