Word: alienate
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...AMERICA'S ECONOMIC LANDSCAPE seems suddenly alien and hostile to many citizens, there is good reason: they have never seen anything like it. Nothing in memory has prepared consumers for such turbulent, epochal change, the sort of upheaval that happens once in 50 years. That may explain why so many voter polls, taken as the economy shudders toward the November election, reveal such ragged emotional edges, so much fear and misgiving. Even the economists do not have a name for the present condition, though one has described it as "suspended animation" and "never-never land...
...bizarre way, television's storytelling has become a form of representational democracy -- or symbolic democracy, anyway. Perhaps, as Quayle says, the mythmaking roles are in the hands of a cultural elite that is alien to much of America. Still, being sensitive to the market economy of ideas and entertainment preferences, television naturally represents various American points of view and dilemmas. It churns out a visual rhetoric, an electronic folklore. It is the griot of American transience...
...point that "Hollywood doesn't like our values." Many in the TV industry agreed that the whole display was, at the vematically disparage such values as patriotism, religious faith and marital fidelity. "Tens of millions of Americans now see the entertainment industry as an all-powerful enemy, an alien force that assaults our most cherished values and corrupts our children," he writes. "The dream factory has become the poison factory...
...continent's inner rhythms of development were shattered 400 years ago by the intrusion of Europeans, who brought in alien controls, boundaries and forms of government. But for the first time since 1444, when the Portuguese sailed into the "land of the blacks" to establish slaving forts, Africa is mostly free from outside interference. Despots are falling; here and there, democracy precariously takes hold. Improvised alternative economies flourish...
Europeans, as the historian Basil Davidson writes, destroyed the moral universe of the continent. Colonialism imposed a different cultural universe with its alien definitions of God and progress and the rule of law. Now postcolonial Africa is defined as being on "the margins" of that universe. But, says Babacar N'Diaye, the president of the African Development Bank, "even if marginalization is true, it is not my concern. What I have to do is to create my self-respect. To create my self-respect is to put my house in order. There is a tremendous venue for intra-African trade...