Word: birching
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...hitting the slopes, the resort is enviably positioned: Snowmass, Aspen Mountain, Aspen Highlands and Buttermilk resorts can be accessed with one lift ticket. And after a day of carving the hillsides, skiers can head to the spa for such muscle-soothing remedies as Siberian fir body wraps and warm birch-oil massages...
...decades, American conservatives have been warning of threats posed to the institution by a broad spectrum of foes. Henry Ford blamed Jews for the efforts to remove religious displays from public schools; in the McCarthy era, the John Birch Society saw the holiday as the target of a vast communist conspiracy. Since the 1990s, a right-wing website has held an annual competition for the most egregious example of secularization. (Villains include the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which christened its year-end party "A Celebration of Holiday Traditions.") But it was really during this decade that the Yule...
...Paranoid Style in American Politics." Hofstadter contends there has been an angry, suspicious, apocalyptic strain in American political life going back to the very beginning of the Republic. From anxieties about the Illuminati in the 18th century to concerns about the Masons in the 19th century to the John Birch Society's assertion that President Dwight Eisenhower was an actual communist agent, Hofstadter suggests there has been a fear about hidden conspiracies that has animated those on the right and the left. He was very clear about that--the paranoid style was not the exclusive province of any party...
...melodrama, it's thumping good stuff. But as politics, it's sort of a train wreck - at once powerful, spellbinding and uncontrolled. Like William Jennings Bryan whipping up populist Democrats over moneyed interests or the John Birch Society brooding over fluoride, Beck mines the timeless theme of the corrupt Them thwarting a virtuous Us. This flexible narrative often contains genuinely uncomfortable truths. Some days "they" are the unconfirmed policy "czars" whom Beck fears Obama is using to subvert constitutional government - and he has some radical-sounding sound bites to back it up. Some days "they" are the network of leftist...
...1930s "said that everybody was going to have to wear dog tags and that this was a plot for the government to keep track of everybody ... These struggles have always boiled down to a contest between hope and fear." True enough. There was McCarthyism in the 1950s, the John Birch Society in the 1960s. But there was a difference in those times: the crazies were a faction - often a powerful faction - of the Republican Party, but they didn't run it. The neofascist Father Coughlin had a huge radio audience in the 1930s, but he didn't have the power...