Word: folke
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...battle is stoked by divisions of class, real and perceived. Jack Welch, head of the 600,000-member Blue Ribbon Coalition of motorized recreationists, calls the greens "elitist." Many of his fellow drivers see their enemies either as rich ski folk defending their million-dollar chalets along the Volvo/Chardonnay line or as REI-outfitted granola eaters who want the backcountry to themselves. The greens in turn view the ATV crowd as an emission-spewing, beer-guzzling NASCAR subset that stops to smell the flowers only after running over them...
...accused of committing at least 120 murders, slaughtering some 2,000 elephants for their tusks, and leading a violent gang that has smuggled rare sandalwood from forest reserves for 30 years. But to the desperately poor living in the fringes of southern India's forests, Veerappan is a near folk hero. In a region with few jobs, he employs them to fell and transport sandalwood trees, pays for people's weddings and, by avoiding capture for decades, has successfully thumbed his nose at legions of corrupt politicians and government officials...
...Puryear's shapes come out of several parallel worlds of form, which, when prolonged, actually do meet. One is industrial--but "obsolete" industrial: the vigorous and noble shapes of what are now antique technologies, such as the carved wooden forms once created by casting patternmakers. Another is folk technology: basket weaving, canoe building, the construction of tents, yurts and kites. (Puryear had some conventional art-school training at Catholic University of America in Washington in the early '60s, but he also worked with African carpenters in a remote village in Sierra Leone as part of a Peace Corps program...
...oddities attend yoga's vogue in America. One is that the U.S. has the fittest people in the world, and the most obese. Yoga, typically, is practiced by the fit. Exercise, the care and feeding of body and possibly mind, is their second career. The folk in urgent need of yoga are the ones who are at the fast-food counter getting their fries supersize; who would rather take a pill than devote a dozen hours a week to yoga; for whom meditation is staring glassily at six hours of football each Sunday; and who might go under the surgeon...
...think, the U.S. that finds letting go of the glorious memory of World War II most difficult. The U.S. lost hundreds of thousands of men in the fighting, but its folk memory of the horror is less hellish than that of other nations. Alone among the combatants, America's heartland was untouched. So no death camps, no Barbarossa. No Hiroshima, Dresden or Coventry. No postwar period searching for scraps of food and shelter, as the Germans and Japanese had to; no dark years of rationed austerity, like most of Western Europe suffered. The rest of the world, in other words...