Word: backlashers
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Some French feared last week that such tactics might trigger a backlash against all Arabs living in Paris. But most Parisians were more concerned about their safety. "I find it very worrying," said Agnes Cavroy, 26, an advertising-agency employee. "You are at the mercy of the bombs." Some far- right politicians talked guardedly about invoking Article 16 of the constitution, giving the President power to rule by decree during a national emergency. At the moment such a measure seems farfetched, but its very mention attested to the siege mentality that has seized Paris...
That air of embattlement has gradually spread across the country. After the contra aid package was passed by Congress this summer, President Azcona predicted a "backlash of subversive acts in Honduras." Two weeks later, seven men with machine guns and hand grenades set upon a prominent Nicaraguan exile, wounding two of his guards. Only a few days later, the car of a journalist who had criticized the contras' presence was blown...
...backlash of this psychosexual tug-of-war is a devestating assault on social mores. The underside of Jeffrey and Sandy's courtship is sadomasochistic sexual initiation, and the institute of marriage is lampooned by intentionally overbearing organ music. Though Lynch seems deadset on satirizing the family, Blue Velvet exudes a romanticism for it akin to that of National Velvet. Perhaps he's saying you can regurgitate your cake and eat it too. Pardon...
Unless carefully handled, such advertising can backfire. "You don't trivialize important issues," says Consultant Miller. "When you trivialize an issue that people take seriously, there is an enormous backlash." The time to use a sidesplitter, Miller says, is "when you're dealing with straight politics, because people don't take politics very seriously...
...backlash drove coke and opium underground. Cocaine was the narcotic of choice among some jazz-band musicians and avant-garde actors and artists, but "decent" Americans steered clear. It was Prohibition, after all, and most Americans in the years after World War I were too busy finding bootleg gin to think about more exotic intoxicants. Marijuana began arriving in large quantities in the 1920s and '30s, smoked by Mexican immigrants who came North looking for jobs. Pot, too, was regarded with horror. One 1936 propaganda film called Reefer Madness warned the nation's youth that smoking the "killer weed...