Word: icon
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Twenty-five years ago, as legend has it, a genie with a six-day stubble alighted on Clint Eastwood's shoulder and vouchsafed him the secret of star acting: "Don't act. You're an icon, pal. Get used to it." The advice has served Eastwood well. From his starmaking stint as the Man with No Name in Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns to this, his fifth film as Dirty Harry Callahan, Eastwood has built a durable celebrity on his unique brand of Zen surliness. By now his character need hardly cock an eyebrow, let alone a trigger, to send...
Moscow kitchen workers, soldiers and maids waited in long lines at hotels to snap up costly and usually unavailable religious books, medals and icon reproductions. At the celebrated 14th century monastic center at Zagorsk, 40 miles northeast of Moscow, the crowds and food stalls lent a carnival air. An aged woman who had come from Leningrad said, "I'm no longer afraid to tell people I'm a Christian," as tears streamed down her cheeks. A young mother held the hands of her two youngsters and remarked, "I hope they can wear their crosses with pride...
...central icon of this singular faith is, inevitably, Mickey Mouse, whose unfailing perkiness and elder-statesmouse status (recently celebrated in a 17- ; day 59th birthday party) assure him success in a culture that has respect for old age and a soft spot for the cute. The little fellow's image is everywhere in Japan -- on Mitsubishi bankbooks, in framed photos within Zen temples, even on Emperor Hirohito's wristwatch. "Mickey Mouse is an actor," explains the slogan on the cover of a Mickey Mouse diary, "and as such he can do anything; he can play any role...
...natives" as legitimate expenses; it waited until 1964 before permitting men and women to eat together in its main cafeteria. Still, the society's flagship, the yellow- bordered National Geographic magazine, which is now distributed in 167 countries, eventually came to rival Mom and apple pie as an American icon. Before skin flicks and magazines became commonplace, National Geographic offered generations of boys their first opportunity to ogle bare-breasted women -- though the breasts were almost always African or Asian, rarely Caucasian. Even today the magazine is squirreled away each month like precious treasure by many of the society...
...anyone doubted that the Bruce icon had become more puffed up than the well-muscled man behind it, they need only have recalled the comic-relief point of the 1984 presidential campaign when Walter Mondale and Ronald Reagan quibbled over which side of the ballot the Boss was on. (Springsteen, to his credit, refused to comment). And when the message of the title song got jumbled from vehement Vietnam-vet outrage to raucous jingoism, it was clear that enough was enough...