Word: crass
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...West Germany, where this summer a German journalist observing Henry Kissinger's personal popularity during his trip to Bonn remarked to an American colleague, "If he hadn't gone to the states, he would have become the chancellor of Germany." On a mass level, this sort of crass, unwritting forgetfulness would never be possible in Eastern Europe, though I might add that on a state level it is consciously practiced...
...that may, however, be just a primary and shallow impression. The people who run the Superdome tastefully avoid talking on and on about its sheer size and assiduously avoid crass comparisons between the Superdome and the Astrodome or the new domed stadiums in Seattle and Detroit. The Astrodome came first, of course, so that may contribute to the Superdome people's reluctance to talk about it, but that's not really the point...
THIS, MAYBE, is the latest incarnation of the American private i., aged past the primed '40s and sagging benignly into dotage, yielding his sleek hide and tough aspect to crowsfeet and innocence. Transplanted from the big bad city and the crass apparatus called technology, the shamus is hiding out in Cape Cod, cloaked as a gracefully-aging police chief who abhors modern development...
Manic Energy. Despite her unprecedented popularity, she grew increasingly dissatisfied with America and Americans, elevating snobbishness, her most unpleasant characteristic, to the height of religious pride. "Such dreariness, such whining callow women, such utter absence of the amenities, such crass food, crass manners, crass landscape!" she wrote after spending a night at a Massachusetts hotel. "What a horror it is for a whole nation to be developing without a sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast." More and more time was spent in Europe, and finally Edith and the ever compliant Teddy took an apartment in Paris, returning...
...response from New York was swift. "I don't think this Administration understands the problems of cities," snapped Mayor Abraham Beame. City Council President Paul O'Dwyer's protest was succinct: "Crass stupidity." Their irritation had some justification. While the city is trying to raise a modest $960 million to make ends meet this month, the U.S. Treasury is borrowing almost $6 billion. Indeed, Treasury Secretary William Simon has said he was "optimistic" that this year's federal deficit can be held to a mere $60 billion on a budget that will include $3.4 million...