Word: belief
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Helms' patriarchal wrath started shaking at its door, the Corcoran caved in and canceled Mapplethorpe's show. Unappeased, the ayatullah of North Carolina proposed a measure that would forbid the NEA to give money to "promote, disseminate or produce" anything "obscene or indecent" or derogatory of "the objects or beliefs of the adherents of a particular religion or non-religion" -- which, taken literally, comprises any image or belief of any kind, religious or secular...
...what the amendment proposes is a loony parody of cultural democracy in which everyone becomes his or her own Cato the Censor. Clearly, Jesse Helms has no doubt that the NEA must be punished if it strays from what he fancies to be the center line of American ethical belief. The truth is, of course, that no such line exists -- not in a society as vast, various and eclectic as the real America. Helms' amendment might have played in Papua, where a Government spokesman defended the banning of Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ on the grounds that...
Perhaps in the end, then, the thing that separates us most from Shakespeare is simply his belief in fairies who can solve all our confusions by going above the heads of lawmakers. The classic premise of comedy, and the ritual revelry from which it springs, is of a story that concludes with a vision of unity, of natural harmony. So, after all the lunacies and bumps of Shakespeare's starlit night are over, the spirits come down to put everything to right, and the lovers awaken with the morning lark only to suspect that it was all a dream. Love...
...sweeping clarity. Instead, the authors prefer to present their findings in the numbing language of social science. "Since the early 1970s," the study states, "the economic status of blacks relative to whites has, on average, stagnated or deteriorated." Consider what that single sentence reveals about white America's smug belief in the healing virtues of progress and prosperity. After nearly two decades, five Presidents, periods of both activism and apathy, largesse and laissez-faire, the result has been at best stagnation...
...unsafe cars Nader helped pressure off the market. On the other hand, we do not get sports analysis made by racists. These mobilizations of social opprobrium are not examples of repression but of freedom of expression by committed people who censured without censoring, who expressed the kinds of belief the First Amendment guarantees. I do not, as a result, get whatever I approve of subsidized, either by Pepsi or the government. But neither does the law come in to silence Tipper Gore or Frank Zappa or even that filthy rag, the Dartmouth Review...