Word: fad
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Fancy or Fad. To some critics, the environmental movement resembles a children's crusade of opportunistic politicians, zealous Ivy Leaguers, longhaired ecoactivists and scientists who speak too sweepingly and too gloomily. The D.A.R. labels the movement "one of the subversive element's last steps." Members of that element, the ladies add, have "gone after the military and the police, and now they're going after our parks and playgrounds." In the same vein, several newspapers from Alabama to Alaska solemnly stressed the happenstance that Earth Day (April 22) fell on Lenin's birthday...
...plot notion hardly impresses serious critics like University of Chicago Economist Milton Friedman. Instead, they view the environmental movement as a mere fad that will soon vanish, like the War on Poverty. Friedman also decries the tendency of some crusaders to cast big industrial corporations* as "evil devils who are deliberately polluting the air." He argues that the real source of most pollution is the consumer...
What makes the flag fad even worse is that the flag is becoming exclusively the property of a group that has abandoned the Constitution, especially the Bill of Rights, in an effort to "preserve democracy." Would those who founded this country have chosen a flag if they knew it would be used as a justification for beating up college students in New York...
Part of the Juju. The latest version of the copper bracelet fad began in Britain during the early '60s and quickly spread to the Continent. In both London and Paris, the green-stained wrist has become a mark of distinction. Among the wearers are the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Lord Snowdon, the Marquess of Bath (who thoughtfully sells the bracelets to sightseers at a souvenir stand outside his castle), Pierre Cardin, Coco Chanel and Stavros Niarchos. Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, the eminent historian, has been wearing his bracelet for three or four years and says its effects...
What was best in the dream-the idealism of the Ban the Bomb movement, a general exuberant impulse toward freedom-finally went mad. For this, perhaps too conveniently, Booker mainly blames the communicators-the fad-conscious journalists, the telly talkers, the trendy film makers-who turned Neophilia into an industry...