Word: atlanta
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Atlanta, as in a lot of other national cities, the large commercial institutions have passed from the hands of home-grown proprietors into the hands of itinerant managers. The middle-management hordes in the suburban office parks don't seem to have much to do with the city of Atlanta; some of them have hardly ever been there. Doug Marlette, the editorial cartoonist of the Atlanta Constitution, has been one of those lamenting the gentrification and homogenization and suburbanization of the city. In his comic strip, Kudzu, Marlette sums up what is happening in one evocative word: Bubbacide...
...think there is nothing to replace what used to feel like Georgia. They wonder whether the point of being liberated from the South really was to live in someplace that isn't anywhere at all. Late in the evening, after a few drinks, they are likely to say that Atlanta has no soul. I asked the novelist Pat Conroy, who lives there, why there is no modern novel that portrays Atlanta in the way that The Moviegoer and A Confederacy of Dunces portray New Orleans. "It's hard to write 400 pages about white bread," he said...
...Atlanta does have a soul, some people think, it is the soul of black folks. When it comes to the black experience in this country, Atlanta has been a national city for a very long time -- not just the headquarters of the movement but a center of black education and place where black people amassed capital early on and developed a solid and prosperous middle class. Atlanta didn't make its progress in race relations because of any blissful absence of bigotry -- it has always had its full share of violent racism -- but because an organized and resourceful black community...
...suppose a lot of white people in Atlanta spend much time talking about its underclass or its soul. They talk about what a splendid place it is to live and about how many people have dug in their heels when faced with transfer to the office parks and new suburbs of some other city. They find Atlanta relatively free of the dreaded insects of Southern summers (because it is higher in altitude than anyone might imagine) and conveniently located (because it is more westerly in longitude than anyone might imagine...
...boosters still talk about such advantages. But, with the Democratic Convention finally about to bring what they see as certification of Atlanta as a national city, they also have the next stage to worry about: becoming an international city. Actually, there was a period about ten years ago when Atlanta featured as its motto the World's Next Great City, but, an advertising man who had to work with the motto told me, "it had a credibility problem. If you told someone in some place like New York that Atlanta was the World's Next Great City...