Word: american
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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THEM, by Joyce Carol Gates. One family's battle to escape the economic and spiritual depression of urban American life, by the author of A Garden of Earthly Delights and Expensive People...
...depicted in The Lonely Crowd 19 years ago, Americans were all too well adjusted to the gray-flannel goals of "success." That is no longer so. David Riesman, who wrote the book with two colleagues and added its title to the American idiom, now finds that after two decades "the earlier tendency toward glib self-satisfaction" has been succeeded by "an atmosphere of what seems to me extravagant self-criticism...
...affluent American middle class will soon start the cheerily commercial annual countdown of shopping days till Christmas. For the unemployed in urban ghettos, it is the season of petty thievery as they seek to provide presents for their children too. A militant civil rights organization in St. Louis wants to put an end to all that and has started a leaflet and poster campaign aimed at the poor with the message: STOP STEALING FOR CHRISTMAS...
...rhetoric aimed only at Moratorium marchers and other opponents of the war. Rather, he is emerging as a kind of improbable mahdi of Middle America. His often odd, occasionally clownish locutions, rendered in a W. C. Fields singsong, are abristle with nostalgias and assumptions of what American life ought to be. Armored in the certitudes of middle-class values, he speaks with the authentic voice of Americans who are angry and frightened by what has happened to their culture, who view the '60s as a disastrous montage of pornography, crime, assaults on patriotism, flaming ghettos, marijuana and occupied colleges...
Occasionally in recent months he has gone on campaigns of self-depreciating humor that debunk the nature of his office?usually with the aid of Paul Keyes, a former writer and co-producer for Laugh-In. Two weeks ago at a meeting of the American Bakers Association, Agnew excused himself by remarking: "The President needs me at the White House. It's autumn, you know, and the leaves need raking." Earlier, at a Gridiron Club dinner, he described the joys of the vice-presidency. "I have my own plane?Air Force 13. It's a glider...