Word: americas
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Agnew is not merely seeking political capital in the South, nor is his 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...
There are more serious criticisms. Agnew delivers a sort of .45-cal. prose ?heavy, highly charged, often inaccurate and dangerous. If students and liberals are disposed to an apocalyptic vision of America as a runaway, can cerous technocracy, Agnew's audiences are suggestible to his appeals to a "Love It or Leave It" America. In Harrisburg. Pa., two weeks ago. Agnew attacked the more militant dissidents as "vultures" and declared: "We can afford to separate them from our society with no more regret than we should feel over discarding rotten apples from a barrel." What did he mean...
Whatever detractors the Vice President may have in the U.S., there is a tiny corner of the earth where Spiro Agnew can do no wrong-the Greek town of Gargaliani. Agnew's father emigrated from there to America 72 years ago, changing his name from Anagnostopoulos and becoming a U.S. citizen. As a first-generation native American, Spiro never spoke his father's native tongue (his mother was American) and is more attuned to Lawrence Welk than to the bouzouki. But in Gargaliani, blood, not tongue, is what matters: the Vice President is revered as a local...
...disappointment. Andreas, who owns the town's hardware store, was invited to attend the National Hardware Show in New York City. It was an exciting prospect, but once the all-expenses-paid invitation was offered, there was suddenly no further word from any of his prospective hosts in America...
Among the town's hierarchy, few rank higher than 85-year-old Andrew Chyrsikos, another of Spiro's cousins. He is what the Greeks call a "Beenamerican," meaning that he lived in America and returned home again. He sailed away, in fact, with Spiro's father, and they shared a room in Schenectady, N.Y., before Theodore Anagnostopoulos moved to Baltimore. Now, sunning himself outside the town library, Chyrsikos likes to one-up Andreas by boasting that his sons in America have visited with Agnew-and even had their pictures taken with President Nixon...