Word: everyman
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Edsall's Chain Reaction is particularly strong in tracing the conservative movement's adroitness in exploiting liberals' errors. The right wing's basic tenets changed little between 1964 and 1980. Yet while Barry Goldwater came across as a reactionary, Ronald Reagan established himself as spokesman for Everyman. Reagan altered some nuances, to be sure, but the major change in the interim was that many citizens had lost confidence in Washington as a fount of social progress...
Idiot proof and practically maintenance free, the tough cycles are the transportation equivalent of the first oversize Prince tennis racquet introduced in the 1970s. Both represent high-tech sports magic in accessible form, an Everyman's ticket to an activity usually ruled by youth and muscle. Behind the growing bike boom in America are all those adventurous teenagers reawakening in millions of overtaxed grownups. Frustrated with sore knees, joggers are turning to biking. Desk jockeys once intimidated by drop-handle 10-speeds can now handle as many as 21 gears on a bike that looks more like something the paper...
Evil is a word we use when we come to the limit of humane comprehension. But we sometimes suspect that it is the core of our true selves. In Young Goodman Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne's Everyman goes to a satanic meeting in a dark wood, and the devil declares, "Evil is the nature of mankind. Welcome again, my children, to the communion of your race...
...even so dogged a digger as Cannon cannot totally excavate all the paradoxes. How a politician so adept at the techniques of public leadership and so closely in tune with Everyman's dreams could habitually divorce himself from the realities of governance remains elusive. Cannon concedes frustration and ambivalence. In one passage he reports his best sources' belief that "Reagan usually operated on the basis of sound instincts and common sense." Later, the same inner circle sees its task as "protecting the Reagan presidency from the clear and present danger of Ronald Reagan...
This is partly a matter of image. Goodman has become our designated Everyman, a Ralph Kramden for the '90s but without the splenetic splutter of Jackie Gleason's immortal creation. An intelligence, a sensitivity he can't quite articulate, just possibly a slight sadness, lurk behind Goodman's eyes, and they ground everything he does in reality. Midler, on the other hand, is our great show-biz floozy, and Allen personifies the anxious urban intellect. It is hard to insert their screen personas into the kind of normal, middle- class lives they are supposed to inhabit here. They require highly...