Word: fetishizing
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...heard during the French Revolution is still widely applicable today. But perhaps even more pertinent would be a variation: "Oh, democracy, what travesties are perpetrated in thy name!" Everybody all over the world seems to want democracy, at least nominally. It is a coveted political status symbol, a powerful fetish. Yet Jefferson and Burke might very well lose their faith in reason or possibly flip their whigs, if they could survey some of the systems that today take democracy's name in vain...
Demy not only risks the commonplace, he makes simplicity almost a fetish, disarms the audience with ingenuousness. Like a kid with a handful of bright new crayons, he scrawls his sadly cynical fairy tale across the shabby landscape of the town. Through his eyes Cherbourg becomes a city of promise done up in candy-box decor, where every shopfront, boudoir and corner bistro has been daubed with gentle pastels or vibrant reds, yellows, pinks, blues. This is the way things ought to be, he wistfully suggests, not yet faded with the passing seasons into the greyness of things as they...
...Kennedy's 1962 pledge of "I can do more for Massachusetts," the former Attorney General's theme in New York is "we can do better." But unlike his brother's empty sloganeering, Kennedy has made proposal after proposal dealing with state and national problems. He has almost made a fetish out of concrete approaches to problems, repeating constantly "we need fewer speeches, fewer generalities, and more specific solutions...
...people get older, their ability to digest certain components of everyday foods seems to change (there may be a decrease in certain enzymes, but no one is sure). So some make a fetish of avoiding chocolate, or uncooked cucumbers, or all cucumbers, or uncooked cabbage, or all cabbage. Then there is the fellow who loudly proclaims, "I can eat anything"-and then slips off to the bathroom for a dollop of soda bicarb...
...worth of transistorized tape-recording equipment to eavesdrop on water beetles and classify their sounds. At Stanford Arthur Bleich, 27, is studying film production by making a 7½-minute documentary called The Rise and Fall of the American Breast-"a serious critique of America's fetish about female bosoms." Stanford is also giving eight-week crash courses in Chinese and Japanese, in which students are required to converse, eat and drink in the style of the language they are studying-or at least try. "I'm going to hwei-jya, change my yi-shang, jump...