Word: cult
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...cult of Kim's personality dominates the capital, Pyongyang (pop. 1.8 million). With its broad streets, tree-lined parks and bucolic riverbanks, the city is in many respects attractive. But virtually all its public buildings are monumental paeans in stone to the "Great Leader," constructed in a style that might be called Marxist Triumphalism. Dominating the skyline is the Tower of the Juche Idea, a 561-ft. stone column topped by a 66-ft. torch that glows at night. Across the Taedong River is the 600-room Grand People's Study Hall, a new national library. Near...
This isolation is doubtless intensified by the lunatic extremes of the Kim cult and the Juche Idea, a somewhat opaque notion that stresses that the masses are the agents of revolution and man is master of everything. The result is government by total mobilization. Kindergarten children march, singing, to school; construction workers march, singing, to work. The Muscovite subway stations, all marble and murals, offer glass-framed copies of the party daily, Rodong Sinmun, on every platform. Meanwhile, at the Mansudae Art Theater, a multimillion-dollar showpiece groaning with chandeliers, the revolutionary opera Song of Paradise climaxes with the cast...
...tragedy of all this lies in the fact that those people who devote their time and energy to serious progressive organizing must continually contend with this venomous cult which mistakes the sound of its own bullhorns for a mass movement. It's hard to believe that "Spartacists politics are based upon the objective interests of the working class," since the Spartacists oppose the working class in Poland, alienate it in America, and patronize it at Harvard. If the Sparts would step down from Mount Marx for a moment, they would see that all they do is screw things up. Jamin...
Even after a dozen novels, including Little Big Man and four books about the lunk hero Carlo Reinhart, Thomas Berger remains a cult writer who shuns literary society and sometimes the 20th century. The Reinhart series (Crazy in Berlin, Reinhart in Love, Vital Parts and Reinhart's Women), published over a 23-year period, suggested that the author viewed postwar American dreams and the liberal imagination with a considered lack of seriousness. Little Big Man's Jack Crabb left a permanent brand on the founding myths of the Old West, and Neighbors contained a persuasive argument for living...
Dallas-based Dr Pepper (1982 sales: $516 million) is among the firms that could be squeezed. Dr Pepper has a near cult following in places like Waco, Texas, where it was invented in 1885. Waco's 100,000 residents each knock back an average of more than 300 bottles a year. But the company has enjoyed little success making Dr Pepper a national brand. The firm lost $4 million in the fourth quarter and finished 1982 with a $12.4 million profit, down nearly 60% from 1981. It hopes that two new decaffeinated Pepper Free brands will help push...