Word: conceits
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...great size of the baby boom generation also encouraged a sort of subliminal illusion. When time flows from father to son, from past through present into future, the generations have their orderly procession, proceeding vertically through time. But it was a metaphysical conceit of the baby boomers that the present expanded horizontally, into a kind of earthly eternity. "We want the world, and we want it now!" In the great collision of the generations, the young created their own world, a "counter culture" as Historian Theodore Roszak first called it, and endowed it with the significances and pseudo-profundities...
Many of these problems did not start with the Reagan Administration. And though the national conceit puts the presidency at the center of our political solar system, no President can shine so brightly that every shadow disappears. Reagan's failure was to deny frequently that the shadows existed. While incumbency rounded out some of his early one-dimensional ideas, Reagan clung tenaciously to his phobias concerning Government intervention and federal taxes. Even Bush has had to acknowledge that Washington must act more vigorously in some areas, but Reagan to the end fought that reality. In one of his several farewell...
Onstage, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Christopher Hampton's adaptation of the Choderlos de Laclos novel, was elegant and epicene. Les Lay caught the novel's central conceit -- that sex is a wicked game, the rankest form of show business -- in a witty talkathon on Topic A. The movie goes one crucial step further, allowing the characters to shrug off their finery and display some redeeming prurient interest. The actresses are all wanly handsome: ornaments of an era close to exhaustion. Pfeiffer and Thurman make for luscious bookends in the library of lust. Close sits back and plays the puppeteer...
This is one of Mississippi Burning's two main fictional conceits: that the FBI broke the case in part by locating not the fear and greed of a Klan informant, but the flinty, vindictive soul of Southern integrity. The other conceit is as low-road as the plot twist in a kung fu scuzzathon. The film imagines that the FBI imported a free-lance black operative to terrorize the town's mayor into revealing the murderers' names. Taken (like much else in the picture) from a report in William Bradford Huie's 1965 casebook, Three Lives for Mississippi, the scene...
...which still retain individual identities in the form of separate alphabets. Serbian words are written in the Cyrillic alphabet; Croatian words, in the Roman. Milorad Pavic, who is a Yugoslav poet, must be sensitive to this split down the middle of his language. He has written a novel whose conceit is that it is a dictionary of three immiscible languages, with three distinct alphabets, corresponding to the three major religions that have shaped the Western world: Greek (Christian), Arabic (Islam) and Hebrew (Judaism...