Word: flipness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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AFTER MAJOR EVENTS, initial interpretations almost always give way to historical revisionism. Usually this process takes years or decades--as with historiographical flip-flopping over John F. Kennedy '40's administration. But in the aftermath of the downing of Korean Flight 007, the rapidity and force with which the left has turned on the official interpretations has served to obscure the entire issue even further...
Similarly, TIME'S tone was flip and irreverent, but the magazine combined with this a certain solemnity about American?and Western?values. These included self-reliance, success and salvation through progress. TIME certainly did not accept T.S. Eliot's metaphor for modern civilization: a review of The Waste Land in the first issue suggested that the poem might be a hoax...
Today, snobberies of residence and place can sometimes be achieved by the familiar flip into reverse snobbery. By the process of gentrification, certain snobs can pioneer in new territories (sections of Brooklyn, for example) and achieve a certain cachet of simultaneous egalitarianism and chic. Then too, there is what might be called the ostentatious plainstyle. In West Texas, for example, extremely wealthy ranchers, their oil wells serenely pumping dollars out of the range day and night, sometimes live in willfully ordinary ranch houses and get around in pickups...
Widespread praise for the council's accomplishments, though, has been tempered largely by the flip side of its initial scorecard: Recurring indications of the council's tendency to follow the quick-and-easy way of reacting to student concerns that has inevitably caused past student governments to fail. The most obvious symptoms were the council's endorsement this spring of several "political" positions. In responding to the call for Harvard to divest from holdings in businesses operating in South Africa and the Food Workers' Union demands during ongoing contract negotiations, the council supported groups without protracted debate, often basing...
...flip side of this is that while developing nations readily accept technical expertise, it is sometimes more difficult for them to accept the validity of the professional skills included in the Harvard package...