Word: hysteria
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Wherever they went during their three-week tour of Europe, the Rolling Stones ignited havoc and hysteria. Now that the Beatles have retired from the road, the Stones have become the big squeal on the international pop-music circuit. They have a unique appeal. Like most British rock 'n' roll groups, they began by imitating such hard-rocking blues merchants as Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters (whose Rolling Stones Blues inspired their name); the result was a musically roughhewn sound sung in mock Negro dialect. In 1964, the Stones decided that if the Beatles were the goodies, they...
...which we>were involved could be less than momentous and decisive for the entire future of humanity. And out of this grew, then, the characteristic emotionalism of militancy--an emotionalism to which the democratic society, with its incorrigible tendency to self-love, is particularly prone: a state of collective hysteria in which you see your own side as the repository of all virtue, the adversary--on the other hand--as the embodiment of all that is evil and inhuman...
While this lapse--and others--results either from myopia, misinformation, or verbal hysteria, the handling of the actual events of the assassination and the assassin is more disturbing. The author's explanation is smug. The Warren Commission's most controversial theory--that one bullet hit both Kennedy and Gov. Connally--is not challenged. Despite Connally's recollection that the first shot did not hit him, Manchester writes "it had passed through...Connally's back, chest, right wrist, and left thigh, although the Governor, suffering a delayed reaction, was not yet aware of it." Certainly Connally may be wrong and Manchester...
...course, may lead into addiction to narcotics." The part about access to LSD may be true, but the part about the narcotics (notice the "of course," immediately hedged by a "may") is bunk, first order. This is an old warhorse, one first heaved up in the great pot hysteria of the thirties; it has never been demonstrated scientifically, there is considerable evidence against it. If you talk to many junkies (I have) you find that many have used marijuana, true, but they've also used alcohol, and that they have found both wanting and have finally settled on the thing...
...style requires leaders in accord with it. It needs the charismatic speaker, the popular folk singer, the crusading star. Protest is also entertainment. A revolt is a "happening," important in its own right and repleat with emotion, even hysteria. Events should be escalated quickly-- piling grievance on grievance and "atrocity" on "atrocity," encouraging the authorities and the police to create martyrs, seeking emotional commitment. The enemy must be personalized and vilified. It is, among other things, a great existential experience...