Word: cubes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Cubism is a fad with many facets. American frivolity in the fine tradition of hula hoops and skateboards. Sillier than a corporate executive on a pogo stick, it could lighten the national blue period. But perhaps because the Museum of Modern Art has found the cube aesthetically comparable to Mondrian and Picasso, the trend has assumed and unbecoming air of profundity...
...cube has become the glossy media's darling metaphor for "interlocking challenges." Fitting square cubes in round holes, Time described the world of international arms sales as a Rubik's Cube. The domestic situation being presumably less puzzling to a chauvinistic nation, opportunities for the analogy's application abound mainly abroad Newsweek compared President Reagan's foreign policy problems to the cube. The world, its cover slickly suggested, may not conform to his red hats-white hats view. Thanks to the analogy, Reagan's inability to handle more than one face of foreign affairs at a time fell into place...
...chastises the President's simplemindedness in foreign affairs the metaphor probably reflects a shared and abiding American faith in a world we can solve. That geometric precision may not be attuned to modern life. The cube cliche recalls the Gordian Knot, that ancient interlocking challenge whose solution held the secrets of Asian conquest. Like Alexander bringing Hellenism to the heathen, Americans want to bear democracy and Western hopes and dreams to an undemocratic non-Western world...
Insofar as these ideals are universally human, the obligation is real, if less manageable than the cube analogy would suggest. Unfortunately, the Administration's puzzle solvers lean towards the engineer's approach to foreign policy take the cube apart, cut the knot with Trident and Lance missiles and try to join the frayed ends...
Turning to another pattern, cubism brings together the American fascinations with the trivia and the inventive Cleverly designed, the cube appeals to a nation that is home to electric can openers, touch-tone phones, and canned hot shaving cream. Americans love garish toys tinged with plastic high tech and the ubiquitous "New, Improved!" label--skateboards with polyurethane wheels, very square exotica from a Hungarian mathematician...