Word: gloom
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche duBois fishes around for some bourbon to kill her jitters and pulls up with a bottle labeled "Southern Cheer." "How can that be?" she quips under her breath. You said it, Blanche--Southern gloom is the Williams world view, and you can fill yourself with three hours of it now at the Orson Welles...
...journals, letters and reports of hundreds of participants and woven them into a totally absorbing, seamless war narrative that a novelist might envy. The voices range from Joseph Plumb Martin, an irrepressible private ("The grapeshot and langrage flew merrily") to General Washington, who was often prey to justifiable private gloom. (All might be well, he reflected in 1776, if his soldiers "would behave with tolerable resolution. But experience, to my extreme affliction, has convinced me that this is rather to be wished than expected...
Caroming between gloom and euphoria, the reader of such conflicting reports can hardly be blamed for a queasy feeling of futurist shock. For prophecy is no longer confined to science fiction or Jeane Dixon. It is in the laboratories, think tanks, universities - everywhere. A.D. 2000 has now replaced 1984 as the favorite year for speculation. At least 400 colleges are offering futurist courses; the World Future Society claims 18,000 members, holds international conferences and produces a semimonthly journal, The Futurist, to ponder new times...
...economy, the TIME-Yankelovich surveys show a remarkable increase this year in the percentage of voters who expect that the economy will get better rather than worse. This, explains Yankelovich, helps those candidates who "have something positive to offer" and hurts those who "articulate discontent" and project "the gloom issue...
...COURSE, no news to seniors that March is the month when the really heavy deals go down. Even non-seniors seem to sense this gloom as conversation among seniors becomes more and more impoverished, turning and returning to the nominations for this and that, applications for such and such, transcripts, interviews with large corporations, whether to lithograph one's resume or simply have it xeroxed. For once, they have to give up their celebrated "free flow of ideas" and knuckle down to the bare facts of who's getting what...