Word: cult
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Columbia University Kremlinologist Seweryn Bialer was in Moscow just before Chernenko's death. "The most overwhelming impression," he says, "was one of gloom. It was the gloom that accompanies the paralysis of leadership. Even before Gorbachev was selected, there was already a cult of personality around him, the hope that he would be able to get the Soviet Union moving again and to keep it moving. In my opinion, that was as important a factor in his quick victory as the votes of loyalty that he got from the Politburo. It was a question of the mood of the elite...
...Trilogy, which began as a radio serial, has grown to embrace a television series, record albums, several theatrical productions and a computer software game. As a result of all that furious merchandising, Adams, 32, a 6-ft. 5-in., former television script editor (Dr. Who), has become a cult figure at colleges throughout the galaxy. So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish is billed, with impeccable logic, as the trilogy's fourth volume. It is the looniest...
...frescoed acre by artists like Caravaggio's early master Giuseppe Cesari, alias the Cavaliere d'Arpino. Limp, garrulous, overconceptualized and feverishly second hand, Roman art in 1590 was in some ways like New York art four centuries later. Against its pedantry--the seicento equivalent, perhaps, of our "postmodern" cult of irony--Caravaggio's work proposed a return to the concrete, the tangible, the vernacular and the sincere. For all the theater and guignol in his work, Caravaggio had far more in common with the great solidifiers of the Renaissance, from Masaccio to Michelangelo, than with the euphuistic wreathings of late...
Unlike Khrushchev, Brezhnev seemed to have no ideas of his own to contribute. He seemed to dramatize the truth of another joke making the rounds: "There can be no personality cult where there is no personality." Brezhnev was certainly no visionary, or even an intellectual. His strength was ^ that he was a man of unusual organizational ability. He also had a gift for compromise and was adept at maintaining a fine balance among different--even opposing--forces. He was an uninspiring leader whose illusion of strong and steady helmsmanship was mainly a scaffolding built by his subordinates...
Besides, is there anything duller than democracy? Where is the pageantry, the fanfare, the inspiring queen, the court intrigue? We have made a cult of monotony, a national religion of similitude: same duties, same opportunities, same rights, same made from. TV ideas. Picture a coronation procession on Pennsylvania Ave., a blast of trumpets for the king, hautboys off-stage, Reagan Rex on a fine Arab charger with Queen Nancy by his side, and the classical monuments of Washington D.C. providing the perfect setting for majesty. All the royalty of Europe would be there, having loaned their jewelry to the tenderfoot...