Word: bedlam
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...perspectives of history, the mad have not been out of sight for very long. As recently as 1800, they were tourist attractions. Every Sunday thousands of paying visitors would go to watch them caper and babble in Bethlehem Hospital ("Bedlam") in London or the Bicetre in Paris. In the 19th century, philanthropy suppressed that, and shame closed the asylums to view, so that insanity was not only confined but also hidden. Our own culture, despite its vast interest in neurosis, has not been able to forgive its madmen their lunacy. Thus the last taboo subject for photography...
...Bedlam...
Fourteen minutes later it was bedlam as Diaz slipped Harvard's third goal into the left corner assisted by Villar. Villar snared a loose ball in close, beat Dartmouth's Kent Pierce and fed Diaz in the crease...
...does not revel in too many lurid scenes of zany inmates being violent or bestial (though it has its share, enough to earn it an R rating). It does not idealize the mental institution as a citadel of scientific wisdom and compassion, nor caricature it as a latter-day Bedlam administered by sadists. It does not explain away its protagonist's schizophrenia with some unearthed childhood trauma, as if the condition were a sort of Freudian acrostic to be solved...
These days most politicians are happy to call themselves conservative, and liberalism has become the sin that dares not speak its name. The September issue of Commentary in a symposium called "What Is a Liberal-Who Is a Conservative?" provides a useful guide to the semantic bedlam. Most of the 64 contributing intellectuals were once content to call themselves liberal. Now they fastidiously invoke qualifiers. They speak of early and late liberals, paleoliberals, center extremists, tough-minded liberals, of "rad-libs" and "trad-libs...