While the book stirs fury against the moralistic government forces arrayed against Joyce's avant-garde masterpiece, Birmingham's book also gives rise to uneasy intimations of the invidious forces of self-censorship at work today, forces that arise from publishers' commercial worries, political correctness, and the hegemony of the campus creative-writing crowd.
Perhaps such moralistic endings were forced on filmmakers by the rules of the Production Code then in effect.
If art is not allowed to explore the complexity of killers, it is little more than a moralistic cartoon of the kind forced on children.
In the midst of Ramsay Street, that magic cul-de-sac where the neighbours' doors were never locked, everyone had a swimming pool and the sun always shone, there lived a "dark force", a throwback to a moralistic, puritanical Australia of the 1950s … The curtain-twitching, sticky-beak, nosy parker neighbour that we all know and hate, Mrs Mangel.
The immediate effect is not moralistic.
Best of all, it's a novel that, without force-feeding any great heroic or moralistic moments, will have its readers longing for its characters' survival.
It was also about the time that media coverage began forcing drugs into two sides of a moralistic dichotomy.
Such moralistic terminology presumes that they, the beheaders, are a Satanic force that can only be exorcised with whatever version of holy water our angelic forces dispense--air strikes, boots on the ground, military aid to the Kurdish peshmerga, efforts in the community to dissuade angry young men from taking the next flight to Mosul.
I gather the idea is to keep people in a perpetual state of fear and anxiety, particularly about their fiscal and health security (selling inoffensive, decorative polka dots amounts to peddling art as comfort food), and it's exactly at this moment when the socially conservative and religious forces move in, taking advantage of this fear in order to assert their moralistic, archaic agendas.
If Trump's history paved the way for moralistic media coverage of those kinds of affairs, he seems now to be neutralizing these stories as a force.
