Word: fin
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...begin with the tale of the fin, its rise and fall from the American car and the American Dream. The design staff at General Motors copied the first fins off a top-secret U.S. Air Force plane (the Lockheed P-38), quietly grafting them as little bumps on the rear of the 1948 Cadillac. The next year's model was a best seller, and as the 1950s progressed, the fins proliferated. They appeared on Oldsmobiles, on Buicks, on Chryslers, with Fords finally sprouting them in 1957. The fins, fickle as Paris hemlines, grew wide and high, rising...
These cathedral spires of the highway were gaudy advertisements for an America that owned three-quarters of the earth's cars. Automobiles were the symbols as well as the vehicles of individual and national progress, so why shouldn't Americans have the most ostentatious models--with new fins each year? At the height of fin fashion, American cars (with sticker prices about the cost of a Levittown house) resembled the pagoda-shouldered pottery courtesans in Tang dynasty tombs--exotica from a lost age of extravagance. The 1958 recession sent the style into decline. Fin de siecle...
Nevertheless, the prejudice that we most firmly share with Luce and Hadden is a fundamental optimism. For them, optimism--a faith in progress--was not just a creed, it was a tactic for making things better. The challenges of a new millennium as well as today's fin-de-siecle scandals require that reporters be skeptical. But we must avoid the journalistic cynicism--as a pose, as a sophomoric attitude--that reigned in the '70s and '80s. Intelligent skepticism can, and should, be compatible with a basic belief in progress and a faith in humanity's capacity for common sense...
Rosenblatt's article was good, but I hardly believe that in 1997 people were driven by "apocalyptic, fin-de-siecle anxieties about the approaching millennium." It is true that people get touchy when encountering the finale of a century, and even more so at the end of a millennium, but violence, insane mass hysteria, suicides, murders and a highly emotional society are not produced by the end of a period of time; they lie in human nature. JANET M. BOLLERO Rosario, Argentina...
...case, there seemed to be a strong current of national melancholy seeking to express itself. The economy was way up, the deficit skinny, unemployment and interest rates down; so it would be hard to argue that melancholy was linked to money. But the fin de siecle came at the same time as the "fin" of other things. An odd loss attended winning the cold war, that of a scary enemy (the effort to inflate Saddam Hussein to that stature was seen as nonsense). There was the apparent end of ideology as the two main political parties settled on common...