Word: fetishize
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...battle over the flag tends to erase distinctions. Says S.I. Hayakawa, president of San Francisco State College: "You can be a rightist or a leftist and be a patriotic American. When a symbol becomes a fetish, then you make the semantic error of confusing the symbol with what it is supposed to symbolize." The flag in theory symbolizes national unity, but such a unity in the U.S. has always been somewhat illusory except when war or depression joined together the nation's disparate cultures to overcome an overriding threat. In any case, national unity can never be legislated or policed...
After building a 6-2 cushion in the bottom of the seventh on the strength of two-run blasts by Carl Yastrzemski and George Scott, the team indulged in their fetish for late-inning dramatics in a familiar...
...Tools. Piene's own inflatables are an effort to get art out of the cult of the unique, ownable object, and away from an art market whose dealings he sees as mere fetish mongering. He wants to change art into a system of total environments, which can be enjoyed but never possessed-as a sunset is unpossessed. "I want to make art as monumental as nature," he says. His sculptures are meant to exist on equal terms with Pittsburgh's buildings, bridges and night...
...certain sympathy for the cause of youthful critics of education today. "Perhaps the time has come to give up all attempts of a faculty to tell young men and women what they ought to study in order to be broadly educated," he writes. "Can it be that the fetish of upholding academic standards has misled us? The educational process should continue throughout life. The knowledge and the skills required in a vocation are something quite apart. Have we in the United States unnecessarily entangled...
Routine vaccination has become an American fetish. There is no doubt that in its first 150 years vaccination was enormously effective in virtually eliminating smallpox from the developed countries of Europe and much of the Americas. But it is deceptively easy to assume that the current U.S. immunity to the disease is the result of continuing mass vaccinations. Probably far more significant is effective border control, which keeps out infected travelers. Changes in vaccination policy are resisted, says Tulane University's Dr. Margaret H.D. Smith, because of "an emotional investment in the traditional role of smallpox vaccination...