Word: cults
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...appeared in Western journals, including the New York Times and the New Leader. In an essay on Russian Novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Mihajlov noted that the true artist "really endangers the dictatorship of the Soviet Communist Party." In another work, he accused Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito of permitting a "cult of personality" and denounced the Yugoslav "party oligarchy" for attempting "to reintroduce total dictatorship in all vital spheres...
Well, maybe. On the other hand, maybe Austen has once again fallen victim to her own cult, the Janeites. The Janeites take their author like warm milk at bedtime, cozily oblivious to the ground glass of her ironies and tough-mindedness. Perhaps only a Janeite would be capable of completing Sanditon-and this version is certainly a skillful pastiche-but at the same time, perhaps only a Janeite could so invert its value. In an afterword, the Other Lady praises Austen for the elegant escapism she provides from "the shoddy values and cheap garishness...
...Cult. In building his new cult, Mobutu has gone so far as to ban Christmas as a national holiday. Some followers even printed hymns in newspapers that substituted Mobutu's name for that of Jesus Christ. In December the state press agency announced that the nation's single political party "must henceforth be considered as a church, and its founder a messiah." Messiah or no, the president himself last month modestly rejected the ultimate title; "Mobutu does not think...
...full speed for two minutes." He has strewn broken glass on a street in Los Angeles and crawled naked through it; at the Basel Art Fair last year (a feast day, on which many priests and their temple dancers gather to exchange the images peculiar to their cult), he had himself kicked down two flights of concrete stairs in front of an admiring throng. He has been shot, though only by a .22 in the arm, by an assistant. All these penances are recorded with great care on video tape and Polaroid film by other assistants, as the deeds...
...part from the ability of councilors to win re-election by appealing directly to a small group of constituents. "You've basically got two types," a Harvard government professor says. "One is the Al Vellucci type, who offers symbolic jokes at Harvard's expense, and the other is the cult figure like Saundra Graham, who has a personal following and an acme of influence in a neighborhood but can't really put a coalition together...