Word: cult
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...caused his role as a kind of ombudsman for humanity to shift somewhat onto his mother's reassuringly human shoulders. Mary as intercessor percolated for several centuries in the Eastern church before exploding in the medieval West. There, fueled as much by folk devotion as by church leaders, her cult eventually can be said to have run wild ("Mary so loved the world...that she gave her only begotten son," ran one prayer), providing fuel for the Protestant reformers' charges of "Mariolatry...
...defiance. Now the boomers, who were raised on episodes of Ozzie and Harriet (and, if anything, identified with David and Ricky), find, to their astonishment, that they themselves have become Ozzie and Harriet: middle-aged! Parents! Conventional! It is a discomfiting transition, as if former members of a Dionysus cult were asked to take up duties as parole officers. The boomers raised hell with authority in the '60s; now some have mixed feelings about exerting that authority themselves--as if it would somehow turn them into their own enemies...
...sounds like a nostalgic pastiche of great moments from the great MGM musicals of the 1940s and '50s, and it would probably be O.K. with Woody Allen if a lot of people out beyond his cult took to Everyone Says I Love You on just that simple level. But we've left out the song-and-dance routine he stages in a hospital corridor. And the novelty number in the funeral parlor. And the fact that the streets through which his people hoof and warble Tin Pan Alley chestnuts are not glamourized back-lot representations of New York City...
...there ever been, a modern American artist with a more peculiarly sacrosanct reputation than Jasper Johns? If so, none spring to mind. Johns' current retrospective of 225 paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures at New York City's Museum of Modern Art has all the air of a cult event. This is not the fault of the curator, Kirk Varnedoe, who has done an exemplary job of hanging the show and, without resorting to the usual pseudo-philosophical guff that attends critical discussion of Johns, describing and analyzing his work in the catalog. Rather, it seems immovably built into the penumbra...
...office. Much could be learned from Pat Robertson, who turned the mailing list generated by his failed 1988 presidential bid into the powerful Christian Coalition. What's next? A slate of credible Reform House and Senate candidates in 1998 would build a more effective party machine and dispel the cult-of-personality image as Perot's captive audience. If major party candidates find themselves courting the centrist Reform vote in 2000 and beyond, the new party can have a significant impact on policy without winning a single election; witness the political energy dedicated to deficit reduction since Perot appeared...