Word: cult
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Toleration does not, however, translate into esteem, though there seems to be much less hysteria about Moon now than there was in the 1970s. California Cult Foe Lowell D. Streiker thinks Moon's imprisonment may strengthen the loyalties of disciples, "but it doesn't help in recruitment or in image building." An even stronger view is taken by Anson Shupe of the University of Texas at Arlington, an expert on the movement. He sees a loss of momentum in the Moon cult, viewing it as an organization in disarray, pouring "millions of dollars down the drain" and unable to hold...
...author throws away his script and improvises a coruscating sermon. Celebrities become the graven images of this slack age, and on their well-coiffed, carefully blow-dried heads he calls down fire and brimstone. Others have drawn up the formal indictment against the cult of celebrities. Schickel offers a white-hot jeremiad. In idolizing and loathing the celebrities we conspire to create, we bury real humanity. Woe unto the celebrities whom we are so good at killing, he warns, and woe unto us. Is there an answer to this sorry circle of fame and deceit? Schickel's conclusion: "Resistance," holding...
...course, the Soviets don't splash their head Reds all overComrademagazine, especially when the ostensible leader is desperately trying to create himself a cult of personality. Gorbachev, though more visible than most saw the public stare in the West only in recent trips to Canada and Britain; he is but tangentially connected to the events of the last three decades...
...however, the ambition seems satisfied by the continuing frenzy of his work, by the attention his policy pronouncements are getting and by the downright amazing adoration he encounters all over the country. Lee Iacocca did not set out to become the object of a personality cult, but hey, what the hell? It is fun for him to be able to turn down a $300,000 TV commercial for Pepsi. "I took a powder," he explains. It pleases him to decline movie producers' serious offers to buy the rights to Iacocca. "The hell with the half-million advance," he says...
...then, under parental pressure, abandoned him to the care of relatives back home in Philadelphia. This unhappy child had grown into a drunk and failure who died at age 28. His widow became the artist's closest friend and companion; she survives as the head priestess of Caroline's cult. Jane Watson ultimately confesses to Anne that she married the son "I didn't love so I could have his mother for my mother." She adds: "Between the two of us we crushed that poor boy into the ground. We killed him as surely as if we'd poisoned...