spectacles

And Alexandre’s movie theater, with its bloody spectacles, gets replaced by something very different: a blood bank, a monument to recovery.

The painting showed an old man in cracked spectacles standing beside a lame horse, in the midst of a homestead that had burned to the ground, so that only the smoking ruins remained.

Fascist leaders need gargantuan physical symbols of their greatness, and both the architecture and the spectacles inevitably trend toward kitsch.

With a rubber hand and a silver tongue, he turns his sales into crowded spectacles.

James Madison memorably concluded, in Federalist No. 10, that democracies “have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention.”