> Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and
>bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the
>Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of
>democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
>
> Harry Lyme
This signature bugs me.
You could argue that warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed produced the great renaissance artists, or you could argue that the craft system of the middle ages produced the renaissance artists. (Have you not noticed how the Renaissance claims credit for ALL the good stuff that was laboriously worked out in the high middle ages?)
Even if peace, brotherly love, and democracy do not produce great art (and that's a big "if"), they do produce a life worth living, which is a much greater thing than the most perfect object.
And then consider the speaker of the preceding: Harry Lyme, the fictional war profiteer who has sold watered down penicillin in order to make money during WWII. True, "Third Man" argues is that no one came out of that one with clean hands and that everyone had their balance sheets out while "watching those little dots down there" from bombing height. -- but except for the extent to which Harry (or the movie) exposes the hypocrisy of his accusers, what is that makes this man your hero?
Joanna