Word: devilment
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...need in America for words of inspiration that do not instantly turn to ashes on the tongue. The Catholic Mass has been largely shriven of ritual mystery. Protestant sermons are soggy with sociology. Occultism, though thriving (TIME, June 19), comes on too much like fraternity rites staged by the devil's disciple. The old maxims ("This above all: To thine own self be true"; "I thank whatever gods may be/For my unconquerable soul," etc.) embarrass. Still, hardly anybody can live on irony and neostoicism for long. Even against what seems to be common sense, it is essential to believe...
...need them on election day." As a result, Perry at first moved cautiously. Even so, his meetings with the poor to work out a program quickly ran into resistance. A snake-handling fundamentalist preacher turned up to rail against the project as the work of either Communists or the devil. Community toughs ambushed one organizer in an abandoned railroad tunnel along Twelve-Pole Creek. Perry began to get death threats...
...Stewart is one of the two or three finest and most popular of the current crop of English pop composer-singers, a wise, witty, upbeat force who neatly counterpoints Mick Jagger's pervading and well-publicized sympathy for the devil. As a soloist, Stewart displays one of those rare voices-a raspy, surcharged cross between Joe Cocker and Rod McKuen-that is instantly recognizable and that can draw all sorts of emotional magic from his own songs (Maggie May, Every Picture Tells a Story) as well as standards by Dylan (Only a Hobo) and Elton John (Country Comfort...
...Puritans were Calvinists, and they brought the work ethic to America. They punished idleness as a serious misdemeanor. They filled their children's ears with copybook maxims about the devil finding work for idle hands and God helping those who help themselves. Successive waves of immigrants took those lessons to heart, and they aimed for what they thought was the ultimate success open to them -middle-class status. They almost deified Horatio Alger's fictional heroes, like Ragged Dick, who struggled up to the middle class by dint of hard work...
Aquarius, the water bearer, has gone to the well once more. This time he is in Miami Beach, a few miles south of Cape Kennedy, site of his devil hunt in Of a Fire on the Moon. In the retirement capital of the world, Norman Mailer is on familiar ground. He has already freelanced his way through three national conventions, most tellingly at the street brawls in Chicago...