Word: badness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...blue: the political conventions a turbulent sea of Old Glories, the campaign (the Reagan campaign, anyway) a triumphal masterpiece of the politics of mood. Walter Mondale ran a depressive, cautionary race, preaching selflessness and self-denial, his speeches like the parable of the Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf (the savage, devouring deficit). But the American public was not in the mood and buried him under a landslide. It was perfectly fitting that the roadside scene was turned into a television commercial--calling up patriotic spirits in the process of selling some beer. The new American mood...
...doing the same thing in the '80s. In the meantime, of course, they have changed. Says Gordon Rayfield, 34, a New Yorker who is a foreign-affairs analyst for a multinational firm: "In the '60s, we felt like this wasn't our country. It was taken over by bad people. Now we realize that it's our country too." In the '80s, the yuppies are starting to take over. They will become the ruling elite of America, a prospect that now gives them spirit, that makes many of them optimistic and hard driving. Reagan took the yuppie vote from Mondale...
...only to evict tenants while he renovated buildings in oasis areas but also to permit only "good people" to move in. "A good person to us was someone who made some contribution to where he was living, someone who would respect the rights of his neighbors," says Lindsey. "The bad people are the people who don't do those things...
Mark Rydell, who directed The Reivers and On Golden Pond, knows how to keep this stuff moving, if not how to make it moving. Here is a story ripped from today's headlines--BAD TIMES FOR THE SMALL FARMER--filmed in a style of roseate elegy. Everything is romanticized, from Mom biting into the season's first ear of corn to Junior eating Oreos on the cab of the family flatbed truck as God's sun sets behind him. Gibson's baby-faced doggedness and Spacek's ingratiating freckles suit them more for roles as college quarterback and star cheerleader...
Entrants in this dense and unprecedented volume range from the heroic to the villainous, from Albert Camus to Lee Harvey Oswald. Mallon welcomes them all to his vast storehouse. Some neighbors provide deep ironic contrasts: Anne Frank tells her diary, "I twist my heart . . . so that the bad is on the outside and the good is on the inside and keep on trying to find a way of becoming what I would like so to be." Four pages later a Nazi architect bitterly considers himself in the third person: "Hitler . . . would have been keenly delighted by the role Albert Speer...