Word: badness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...more complete answer is much more self-critical, based largely on the American psyche. Other nations, after all, share similar frustrations. But they don't respond the way we do. We Americans favor and justify retaliation because we see things in terms of the good-guys and the bad-guys. And, not surprisingly, the U.S. is almost always the good-guys in this neat formula...
...retaliatory acts are not as "surgical" as we would like to believe. We strike out at the baddies, but often hit the innocent. When good-and-bad ideological divisions are translated into actions, our friends overseas are right to fear, and maybe Americans should...
...opening of his 1936 story Goldfish: "I wasn't doing any work that day, just catching up on my foot-dangling." Currently, Parker's Spenser sings the best sassy blues: "Ideal options aren't something I have much to do with. Most of the time I'm shuttling between bad and worse." Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer prefers stride (when he's not playing chopsticks), and John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee fuses bebop and rap: "Go get the lady with the unusual haircut and add her to the stack. Go get Meyer and the boat and bring the boat...
That great leveling effect, however, has not made pop any more palatable to old-line intellectuals. The contempt was, until rather recently, obligatory and absolute. Mandarin ill will reached a peak in "Masscult & Midcult," Dwight Macdonald's acutely cranky 1960 essay. "Masscult is bad in a new way," he wrote, because "it doesn't even have the theoretical possibility of being good." A pernicious "Gresham's law" was inevitable: good art would be driven out by the bad -- by pop. Another ferocious holdout is William Gass, a very intelligent critic whose opaque, self-conscious novels are the sort of fiction...
...Marc Pachter, a historian at the Smithsonian Institution, foreigners may turn to the left precisely because they like American pop so much. At least in Europe, argues Pachter, youthful political anti-Americanism is a way of "justifying their enormous thirst for American pop culture. As long as they can bad-mouth the society that produces the stuff, they don't feel so bad about indulging in its exports." But even then, apolitical American targets are not always off limits. After the U.S. bombing of Libya in April, a mob in Barcelona stoned a local McDonald's. Last year Peruvian Marxists...