Word: aztecs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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South of the border, it is turista or "the Aztec two-step." In Asia, visitors from the West call it "Delhi belly." By any name, traveler's diarrhea, a debilitating digestive upset caused by a change in the system's bacterial population, is a synonym for misery that can spoil a trip and jeopardize the victim's health. The standard prophylactic for many years has been Entero-Vioform, a drug so frequently used that it is the traveler's best friend. That fond relationship has come under challenge by the American Medical Association. The A.M.A. Journal...
...from the next century. Its proportions are so gargantuan that even an unwilling observer is thrown into the role of a tiny mannequin in an architect's scale model. The low-rise section has the sinuousness and personality of a granite python, and the tower rises mute like an Aztec altar. Some people claim that architecture like this requires a new grammar of response; I think instead that Mather House almost demands that we abandon our way of seeing...
Many observers are most concerned about the sadistic component of much current pornography. "No civilization, with the possible exception of the Aztec, could produce an art whose sexual ferocity would rival that of the West," according to Mexican Poet-Diplomat Octavio Paz. In Western pornography, "death spurs pleasures and rules over life. From Sade to the Story of O, eroticism is a funeral chant or a sinister pantomime." Reading about sadism can have a cumulative effect, according to Psychoanalyst Ernest van den Haag. Der Stunner, a Hitlerite journal that mixed anti-Semitism and sex, contributed to the general atmosphere that...
Mexico, according to one etymological theory, is an Aztec term meaning "land of the people buried under lava." Today it is a country almost half of whose 48.3 million people are buried in poverty. Urban industrialization and agricultural reform have made Mexico the most economically successful of Latin America's countries, with an annual growth rate exceeding 6% over the past decade. In the past two decades, per capita income has doubled to almost $600 a year. Yet most of Mexico's small farmers, as well as the country's 3,000,000 Indians, still live...
Playing amateur archaeologist among the Aztec ruins, Brill tries to poke home the author's moral: Look at what becomes of people who worship gold, the "sun's excrement," instead of the sun. Alas, Bourjaily's real message is this: Nobody is likely to become extinct faster than American novelists trying to rework Lost Generation formulas in the age of Aquarius...