Word: cults
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Like one of King's long-winded novels, Golden Years takes its sweet time unfolding. But the result is unusually dense and evocative TV drama. At times the show recalls another TV excursion into paranoid sci-fi: The Prisoner. That short-lived cult hit came and went during the summer...
...hated the bogus mysticism that clung to interpretations of American art in the '50s -- the cult of the heroic personality, of expressive blood and guts, of the Artist as Fate-Defying Existentialist. "My painting represents the victory of the forces of light and peace over the powers of darkness and evil," Picasso had pompously announced in 1957. Well, fine, wrote Reinhardt, but "my painting represents the victory of the forces of darkness and peace over the powers of light and evil." How he would have loathed the market-and- genius cultism of the '80s! He defined...
Afrocentrism, a cult within the multicultural movement, displays some distressing signs of authoritarianism. A series of "baseline" essays, commissioned by the Portland, Ore., school district as a reference for teachers and now in widespread use elsewhere, contains some sweeping assertions: "Black literature is manipulated and controlled by white editors and publishers." And: "Until the emergence of the doctrine of white superiority, Cleopatra was generally pictured as a distinctly African woman, dark in color." The claim that ancient Egypt, one of the cradles of Western civilization, was a black culture is a central tenet of Afrocentrism. Corroborating evidence is flimsy...
...20th century, new immigration laws altered the composition of the American people, and a cult of ethnicity erupted both among non-Anglo whites and among nonwhite minorities. This had many healthy consequences. The American culture at last began to give shamefully overdue recognition to the achievements of groups subordinated and spurned during the high noon of Anglo dominance, and it began to acknowledge the great swirling world beyond Europe. Americans acquired a more complex and invigorating sense of their world -- and of themselves...
...pressed too far, the cult of ethnicity has unhealthy consequences. It gives rise, for example, to the conception of the U.S. as a nation composed not of individuals making their own choices but of inviolable ethnic and racial groups. It rejects the historic American goals of assimilation and integration. And, in an excess of zeal, well-intentioned people seek to transform our system of education from a means of creating "one people" into a means of promoting, celebrating and perpetuating separate ethnic origins and identities. The balance is shifting from unum to pluribus...