Word: fad
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...FUTURE OF THE CAR. We are just not attuned to getting anywhere any other way than by automobile. Some people ride buses. Now trains are coming back-but it's a fad. This country developed in a particular way because of the automobile, and you can't just push a button and change...
Back in 1844, social critics condemned the polka as a menace to life, limb and morality. They should have lived long enough to see the Kung Fu, the latest dance fad karateing the country. Inspired by the Oriental hand-to-hand combat form (via the weekly TV series of the same name) and a best-selling spin-off record called Kung Fu Fighting, the dance resembles a samurai samba...
Starting in the mid-'50s, perhaps after publication of Bruce Catton's A Stillness at Appomattox in 1953, Americans developed a kind of hobbyist's passion for the Civil War. It may even have been a subliminally sinister fad. The Supreme Court's 1954 Brown decision reawakened sectional fervors-an Impulse in some to fight it out again, not on crass and specific racial grounds but over the once bloody, somehow romantic battlegrounds of history. Buffs dragged their children in Yankee or Rebel caps over the cemetery farm land of Gettysburg, fast growing commercial. Book clubs...
...Stillness at Appomattox, Mississippi-born Novelist Shelby Foote began what was to have been a short, one-volume history of the war. Now, 20 years and 2,934 pages later, he has completed his history with this third volume. It is a pity that the Civil War fad seems to have abated; a historical narrative as rich in detail and purely exciting as Foote's deserves an audience of amateurs as well as professionals...
Photography is a fad right now, and so the show's catalogues will probably sell well, despite their $25 price tag. But if photography is to become more than a fad and be recognized for the serious aesthetic potential which it does have, its new proponents will have to develop a far better sense of the medium's history and possibilities than Doty and the Whitney demonstrate in this show...