Word: demigod
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Jackson Pollock, by Frank O'Hara, extravagantly lauds the late drip painter. Pollock was no demigod nor even a prophet, simply an original and forceful decorative artist on the grand scale...
Ever since the ancients labeled them kin to Hanuman. demigod king of the monkeys, India's monkeys have been prolific, pampered pests. But starting in 1951, when scientists discovered that rhesus monkey kidneys were ideal for making polio vaccines, hordes of the primates were lured from the Assam jungles to worthy ends in the laboratories of the world. Shipping 150,000 small brown monkeys annually to 30 countries (80% to the U.S.), India earned $3,000,000 a year in foreign exchange; four big exporters and 5,000 trappers prospered, and many airlines cashed in on the boom...
...visitors from India danced and acted, good always triumphed, and whoever got his comeuppance was lucky to be merely killed. In one Kathakali (story-play), a demigod suffered a fate worse than death (because he rejected a nymph's advances); he was transformed into a creature half man, half woman. In another dance-drama an unbelieving king was devoured by the god Vishnu, who relished every morsel-as red streamers representing the king's innards were clawed out of his corpse...
...life a dress rehearsal for death. He regards a soldier's calling as holy, for he believes that God is a fellow Prussian. When his monocle glints, junior officers blanch. But just as no man is a hero to his valet, so no general is a demigod to his driver. Sergeant Major Horlacher is as common as dirt, and plays an ironic Sancho Panza to Von Puckhammer's Don Quixote...
...forward this new impression, it was necessary first to smash an old idol. Overnight the world saw the myth of modern Communism's demigod junked, and the great man's works and ways dismissed as "20 years of dictatorship and lies." The very name of Stalin all but disappeared from the press. On Army Day his picture was missing from its place of honor beside Lenin's in Moscow's Central Army Theater. "Svetlana's Breath," the bestselling perfume named for Stalin's daughter, vanished from the perfume counter in Moscow's Hotel...