Word: hyper
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...faery world affluence of the '60s and '70s fades into the dim gray of an inflationary, post-industrial society. Current disillusionment and failure naturally foster exaggerated perceptions of past-promise and potential. There was a time when something special about American ingenuity, self-confidence and leadership exalted patriotism beyond hyper-nationalism to the realm of highest religious abstraction: faith was grounded in sheer success. The country could have no trouble fighting its enemies abroad or preserving liberty and prosperity at home--this, after all, was the American century...
...candidate for the Citizens' Party. Unlike his doctrinaire chums on the left--Socialist candidate David McReynolds or Communist standard-bearer Gus Hall--Commoner is neither closed-minded nor inflexible. And he is serious enough a candidate to be on the ballot in more than 40 states (Massachusetts, with its hyper-strict ballot access requirements, is not on the list; Bay State supporters will have to write in for Commoner...
Beyond that lack of leaders, and the divisions that emerge from single-issue politics, there are other frailties. In the '60s, the left was hyper-organized, able to turn out massive amounts of money and support. But as the reformers of that decade opted out of the system, the networks began to collapse. Simultaneously, the right began to learn its lesson. A man named Richard Vigurie looked fondly at the power of the Sierra Club or the anti-war groups to mobilize support, and decided to go them one better. His computer bank now contains more than 20 million names...
STAGING THIS hyper-intellectual verse play is a risky venture as best in these postlapsarian times. Awash in his hard-won Catholic faith, T.S. Eliot spun Murder in the Cathedral in 1935 out of the stuff of the ritual he was preoccupied with and the metaphysical poetry he esteemed. Since then, its readers have appreciated its poetic merit, but its audiences have sat uncomfortably as paradox and conceit flew by, just out of their grasp...
Cross the wild and crazy humor of Steve Martin with the well-calculated mania of Carl Reiner and what do you get? A hyper hybrid movie called The Jerk. About a weirdo white raised by a poor black Southern family, who;hearing his first Lawrence Welk record, hits the road north to find his own kind of music. "All they played when I was a kid," explains Martin, a.k.a. the Jerk, "was blues." Martin mints a fortune by inventing nonslip eyeglasses, loses it when Reiner, in a walk-on as an irate consumer, brings a successful suit in behalf...