Word: americana
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First, we must shift our defense to a multilateral partnership with our allies in Europe and East Asia, while we can still do so smoothly. Maintaining the fiction of Pax Americana not only worsens our own situation, it is dangerous for all democracy. We may soon become an unreliable and overextended ally...
...years of active life, from 1947 to 1986, Folkways Records was a crazy quilt of Americana, a general store with a deep inventory of oddity, inspiration and wonder. The records sounded as if they had been made out in a field, as indeed they sometimes were. All done up in a sturdy cardboard sleeve, they even felt different. But in the midst of all this homespun, Folkways achieved what other companies bring off by accident: it got history on record...
Imagine Clark Gable anchoring one of Frank Capra's psychodrama parables of Americana and you get a hint of Jeff Bridges' performance in Tucker: The Man and His Dream. The roguish, can-do smile looks welded on. No boardroom backstabbing, no political malfeasance can wipe that salesman's grin off his face. It is the smile of a cockeyed optimist whose tragic flaw is that he refuses to believe anything can go wrong. And it is attached to a mind racing with ideas and a mouth that motors even faster. Bridges' Preston Tucker is a man in perpetual motion -- gesticulating...
...such moments, all these people sound suspiciously like DeLillo, 51, whose career has been nourished by the public disillusionment and skepticism that began to spread after the nightmare of 1963. His eight previous novels, beginning with Americana (1971), hover devotedly over repeated themes: events are never what they seem; there may be no such thing as randomness; secrets and mysteries control our lives...
...stretching from O'Neill and Tennessee Williams to Sam Shepard and August Wilson, the overwhelming concern is the family, and the perpetual battleground is the hearth. The nominal topic of debate may be a fighting cock rather than a football game, but the passions of these playwrights are genuine Americana...