But Iraq itself, which was visibly deteriorating, looked nothing like the President's exalted vision.
The reality of Serbia was increasingly grim, a country poor and isolated, a far cry from the exalted vision that Mr. Milsovic started by offering the Serbs, most memorably, at Kosovo Field in 1989, on the 600th anniversary of the Serbs' losing battle to the Ottoman Turks.
From that first movie to his last, Cimino erected and demolished myths, exalted and rued visions, embraced and decried national passions in the same cinematic gesture.
It's that we experienced those events with the same vision, both exalted and skewed, the sometimes almost hallucinatory vision of childhood.
None of which is news to Ms. McEvoy, who sees as her mission the lifting of the Martha Stewart vision to an exalted plane.
Hadley, on the other hand, with her clear-eyed vision and less exalted view of herself, would have seen it as lunch.
And so it goes, with science continuing to chip away at humanity's vision of its own exalted importance.
Before long, he was sampling from an array of sources, skipping from the "I Have a Dream" refrain to Isaiah's vision — "every valley shall be exalted" — and blurring the boundaries between oration, sermon, and song.
(Of course, Malick himself, whose movies of exalted aesthetic confection are also rooted in a tragic vision of violence, proves that the dichotomy is artistically bankrupt).
It's the justification for putting off quality time with Balzac and Flaubert in favor of the gustatory noodlings of Peter Mayle, whose vision of Gallic culture exists on a somewhat less exalted plane.
