Word: helplessly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...first step has been to demythologize the images of Black Macho manhood and super-womanhood. Black Macho starts with the identification of the black male as a helpless cripple, who stands idly by while his woman totes laundry and cleans kitchens to feed his children; she gets raped or seduced by the white man, and generally perverts the normal family structure to encourage her dominance. Gradually his rage grows, he longs to assert his control over himself, his woman and his race; finally, he explodes. But when he does it is in terms of spontaneous and largely ineffect ive outbursts...
...everywhere, it was decided that because of slavery, racism, whatever, black women had become castrating machines who lived to put their man down while they strove only to pull themselves up. At the same time, the black woman, less of a women in that she is less feminine' and helpless...is really more of a woman in that she is the embodiment of Mother Earth, the quintessential mother with infinite sexual, life-giving, and nurturing reserves. In other words, she is a superwoman...
...audience is like the helpless group trapped in the diner, and is treated with equal contempt. Messages are pounded into us without letup--the Vietnam generation turning its violence back on America, the helplessness of women (who do nothing but tremble and bawl, and like Cheryl repeat 90 times, "I'm scared"), the arrogance of power, the sadism built into our society. We are supposed to sit there mesmerized and say, "Gee, I never thought of that," as if we haven't been thinking all these things for a long time. It is no longer enough merely to throw such...
Abandonment is a word that echoes through the Rand study, and the Vietnamese argue that U.S. withdrawal left them not only short of supplies but psychologically helpless. As Barry Zorthian, former minister-counselor for information of the American embassy in Saigon, said after reading the Rand study: "It pulls together the inherent contradictions in our relationship, that love-hate. There was a Vietnamese way of doing things and an American way of doing things. And we did neither." One of the Vietnamese officials concluded more tersely: "To sum up, the war was lost from its inception...
...sentiment or an idea that they want to produce before the world, they seek each other out, and when found, they unite," observed Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835. Editorialized the Nation in 1865: "If the Englishman can initiate no public enterprise without a public dinner, the American is equally helpless until he has called a convention . . . We are living in a very gregarious time...