Word: boogeyman
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...journal Science last summer carried the headline evidence found for a possible "aggression" gene. Waiting in the wings are child-testing programs, drug manufacturers, insurance companies, civil rights advocates, defense attorneys and anxious citizens for whom the violent criminal has replaced the beady-eyed communist as the boogeyman. Crime thus joins homosexuality, smoking, divorce, schizophrenia, alcoholism, shyness, political liberalism, intelligence, religiosity, cancer and blue eyes among the many aspects of human life for which it is claimed that biology is destiny. Physicists have been pilloried for years for this kind of reductionism, but in biology it makes everybody happy...
...which coincided precisely with the issues Bush had cited in the debate. Dukakis also named cases where the A.C.L.U. has sued his Massachusetts administration -- over random roadblocks and for resisting the assignment of foster children to gay couples. So successful has Bush been in making the A.C.L.U. into a boogeyman that even his friend Dick Thornburgh, the new Attorney General, has had to scramble away from the group. He was a director of the Pittsburgh A.C.L.U. chapter from...
...past two Nightmares the tone has turned more facetious, the special effects toward the shoestring spectacular. Freddy now delivers double entendres like a James Bond boogeyman and devises custom-made tortures like the wardens of Room 101 in 1984. But he still represents the thing teens love to hate: Dad. "Freddy is the most ruthless primal father," says Craven. "The adult who wants to slash down the next generation." No keys to the car, Son. And no clean beaches, no safe streets, no safe sex, no noble politicians. Just a zillion-dollar debt for you to pay, and a nuclear...
...Psycho. For all its flaws, the picture deftly scares and excites people with fun-house-mirror reflections of themselves. As Director John Carpenter (Halloween) notes, "The strongest human emotion is fear. It's the essence of any good thriller that, for a little while, you believe in the boogeyman." Or woman...
...U.S.S.R., both of which tend to stand innocently in the wings, elicit criticism as well. They selfishly inflict the American-Soviet dispute on a region whose occupants have many more pressing concerns than whether the "Reds are coming" or whether the descent of the "Capitalist boogeyman" is imminent...