Word: hysteria
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Stage-door Janies have always been more demonstrative than stage-door Johnnies. Juvenal railed bitterly against flirtatious Roman ladies in whose eyes any gladiator, however ugly, was "transformed into a Hyacinthus." No Ziegfeld girl ever inspired a male reaction remotely comparable to the mass hysteria of Sinatra's swooners in the 1940s or Elvis Presley's frantic fanatics in the 1950s. Such adulatory demonstrations were mild, however, compared with those of a new and even more liberated breed of female hero-worshipers. They are the "groupies." Their heroes are rock musicians-and their worship knows no bounds...
...SITUATION is one of incipient public hysteria. With the exception of extremist groups like the JDL, WBAI's problem has been to a large degree on of misunderstanding. The most vociferous protestors are those who have never actually listened to the station, which is an open forum to all points of view. The poem was taken out of context, as an expression of the station's general policy. But once one accepts the fact that WBAI is not anti-Semitic, that the charges are ridiculous, and that the First Amendment will save the station, our discomfort still remains. The climate...
...really just a narrative device, just an excuse for the telling of a story. In the case of Portnoy, we never forget that he is lying on the couch. He is recreating the past from a specific, highly-emotional point in the present. Emotion recollected in tranquillity turns into hysteria. Each time Portnoy's mother Sophie reappears, another bit of horror is added. Portnoy justifies it all by saying she wears "the old self-conscious on her sleeve!" In any case, she soon seemed to me more like the witch out of Disney's Snow White than anyone else (which...
...Yugoslavia and Austria. Siggy calls these notes his "prehistory," and his recollected stories seem touched by the bizarre influence of Gunter Grass. On the day in 1938 when Austria capitulates to Hitler, for example, a man whom Siggy's mother loved but did not marry creates hysteria in Vienna by running around costumed as a Habsburg eagle. Siggy's real father is a Yugoslav who escapes on a motorcycle in 1944, during the terrible struggle between the German army, Tito's partisans, Mihailovich's Chetniks and a Croatian terrorist gang...
...light of Judaism's centuries-long experience of persecution, it is not surprising that some of the reactions to anti-Jewish statements made by black leaders have verged on hysteria. When students?led, ironically, by a Black Jew who once attended Hebrew teacher's college?recently held a sit-in at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., a Jewish leader in the area suggested that "Brandeis should be made Schwarzenrein [free of blacks] the way Hitler made Germany Judenrein. One member of the school's board shouted that "we should go down there and throw the blacks out." Speaking...