For no particular good reason, I was trawling on the Net about Rosie the Riveter, an icon from World War II. If you don’t know about Rosie, you really should check out the Wikipedia article. Another good page on Rosie can be found at the eponymous website. I’ve always liked Rosie because she represented not only American can-do spirit but — perhaps without anyone realizing it at the time — she pointed to a time when the United States would more fully live up to the ideals it claimed to be fighting for. I am always fascinated with what I call the “Gorbachev paradox”, when cynical leaders conscript high-sounding and idealistic words to cloak their pragmatic and sometimes nefarious deeds… and then get hoist up on those same words, forced to live up to them by people who’ve had the gall to actually believe the noble sentiments.
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