Word: fetishize
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...Atkinson was addressing a situation that Conant and Chauncey didn't imagine. The SAT, now with millions of takers a year, has become a national fetish. A large portion of the high school student and parent population believes it is the main determinant of admission to a selective college, which in turn is the main determinant of one's eventual socioeconomic status (both propositions that the test's makers heatedly deny). High school students and their parents also believe that scores on the all important test can be raised by spending hundreds, even thousands, of dollars on courses that teach...
...What the fellow was about was a dour, insufferable, high-principled and wholly admirable political puritanism that makes a mockery of today's craven politics-by-focus-group-and-poll. John Quincy Adams could not be accused of doing merely the popular thing; he made a fetish of doing the unpopular thing. I don't say that George W. Bush bears any discernible resemblance to John Quincy Adams, beyond being a WASP son deeply proud and warmly devoted to his father...
...Reagan made a movie with a chimp, Carter owned a peanut farm. But Clinton was wildly generous to the comedic mind. In 1992 he served up an exotic tapas buffet of premises that included his saxophone, his too-short jogging shorts, his light-switch "sincerity" and his McDonald's fetish. And as we began hungrily digging in, he emerged with a hearty stew of Gennifer Flowers, "I didn't inhale" and Whitewater...
...Maui are so jammed with Gulfstreams and other jets that you'd have to call in advance to find room to park yours. The most luxe of these planes come crammed with the toys that keep billionaires happy: showers, kitchens, satellite TVs. Gulfstream in particular has always been one fetish ahead of the acquisitive billionaire...
...exhibition's auto-eroticism sector does, however, include one triumphal fetish--Larry Fuente's Derby Racer, 1975. Like some pious Latino decorating a shrine, Fuente glorified a convertible jalopy with an undulating crust of shards, beads, mirror fragments and pearly gewgaws. It is still a convincing, near folk object--an automotive equivalent, perhaps, to Simon Rodia's towers in the Watts neighborhood of downtown Los Angeles...