Word: cults
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Spying Halt. Not even the name of the DOD's present chief is known publicly, though Watergate Burglar E. Howard Hunt claims to have been its first chief of covert action. In his book The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, Victor Marchetti, a disaffected employee who left the agency in 1969, reports that the DOD at that time had a staff of a few hundred people and an annual budget of up to $10 million. It operated field offices in at least ten U.S. cities...
Illegal broadcasting by homemade transmitters has become a persistent and growing youth cult in the Soviet Union. After samizdat (clandestine publishing of dissident writings) and magnitizdat (circulating tapes of unorthodox poetry and music), there is now radioiz-dat-air-it-yourself programs of pop music, teen-age talk, messages to girl friends and even dirty jokes. All of which represents a somewhat refreshing contrast to official state-controlled broadcasting, which is apt to be long on lectures about beet growing and the life of Lenin, but short on entertainment...
...answering those questions, pop-cult students delve into some unconventional projects. For example, Pamela Ecker, a second year graduate student, recently completed a study on the social significance of the T shirt. She based a paper on the idea of "people using clothing to give a message," and then designed bright yellow T shirts emblazoned with caricatures of easily recognizeable contemporary objects-including TIME covers, Volkswagens and McDonald's golden arches-for students to wear to class...
Other colleges have taken up pop cult as a serious discipline too. Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago and Morgan State University in Baltimore have started popular culture programs, and Browne says he has received letters from many other schools inquiring about how to start similar courses. "Campuses are losing students, and many are reaching for new programs," he says. "Back in the '60s it was change for change's sake, now it's change for the students' sake...
Despite its apparent success, the popular-culture department is regarded with less than complete enthusiasm by many of Bowling Green's faculty members. Says pop cult Assistant Professor Michael Marsden: "There's still the suspicion that we're pandering to popular tastes and faddism." There may be some cause for this suspicion. Even its sup- porters admit that popular culture is not a well-understood discipline. One question on the final exam for the introduction-to-pop course this month asked, "How would you now explain to your parents what this popular-culture stuff is all about...