Word: backlasher
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...intransigence, regime opponents are increasingly abandoning peaceful attempts at change. Not only is the resistance movement turning to increasingly strident tactics, but white progressives say Black bitterness threatens interracial cooperation against apartheid. At the same time, Prime Minister Botha's efforts at even token reforms have unleashed a substantial backlash among white South Africans, with a substantial portion of the Afrikaner electorate backing a splinter far right party formed...
...stage for fragments of Elizabethan comedy, bits of Wodehouse farce and a generalized send-up of The Great Gatsby. There is even a climactic courtroom scene in which Teeters must defend himself against charges of smut peddling. Unfortunately, he has arrived in Merrymount one beat behind the conservative backlash and cannot convince a jury that his cassettes are the visual equivalent...
...number of street people grows, so does the backlash, raising disturbing questions about hostility to the poor and the use of the homeless as scapegoats. A Fort Lauderdale city commissioner suggested rat poison as a topping for local garbage, then retracted the statement and recommended the use of chlorine bleach instead. In Santa Barbara, Calif., a 35-year-old drifter was found shot to death in December, and a flyer was circulated threatening more violence to the homeless who camp there. Jerry Hill, an Episcopal priest in Dallas, says that people who camp at the outskirts of the city endure...
Some offer a Darwinian explanation for the backlash. Katy Sears-Williams, 42, a stockbroker and city council member in Santa Cruz, says, rather clinically, "It's an understandable and common reaction for any animal society to rid itself of those who aren't productive." Part of the reaction seems to stem from a common perception that the homeless of today are basically the crazies of the 1960s refurbished with a new name. "We called them the hippies, and the beatniks before that, and hoboes before that," says Sergeant Bill Aluffi of the Santa Cruz police. "Most of them, I think...
Samuel Popkin, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, says the backlash "reflects a kind of deepseated fear and anxiety; it's like lynching in the South, a way of purging fears through extreme action against scapegoats...