Word: icon
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Constitution has its other, mundane life. Down at sea level, where people struggle along in law courts and jailhouses and abortion clinics, where lives and ideas crash into each other, the Constitution has a more interesting / and turbulent existence. There the Constitution is not a civic icon but a messy series of collisions that knock together the arrangements of the nation's life. Those arrangements become America's history -- what its people do, what they are, what they mean. Walt Whitman wrote, "I contain multitudes." That is what the Constitution does -- an astonishing feat considering the variety of multitudes that...
...portraitist of its heroes -- especially of Washington, whom he painted over and over again with stiff, idolizing devotion for more than 20 years. It is a small example of the utter unfairness of art that for all his labors it was not Peale who created Washington's definitive icon for posterity but rather Gilbert Stuart -- a better artist but also a Tory who had cut and run for England when the cannons fired and only came back, as he put it, "to make a fortune by Washington alone; I calculate upon making a plurality of portraits...
...fireworks bathe Independence Hall in a Bicentennial burst of glory, Americans feel a reverential glow. The framers' words, painstakingly inscribed on four sheets of parchment, have the aura of the sacred about them. The Ark of America, it is a civic icon that is worshiped, if not always read. But the Constitution has its other, mundane life down at sea level, where wants and ideals crash into one another. Every year the U.S. reinvents the meaning of the document. In this special issue TIME organizes its usual sections under language from the charter and celebrates the continued vibrancy of those...
...power of television to make or break reputations. Back in the kinescope era, Freshman Senator Estes Kefauver starred in a dramatic series of organized- crime hearings; the next year he almost won the 1952 Democratic presidential nomination. The Senate Watergate hearings, of course, transformed Sam Ervin into a national icon and forever linked Howard Baker with the line "What did the President know, and when did he know it?" But the TV cameras can also be cruel; Watergate did little to enhance the political careers of the weaker performers...
...orchestra created specially for him. As director of the NBC Symphony, he reached a national radio and television audience and became a visitor to millions of homes that had never heard classical music in such abundance. He was no longer merely a conductor; he had become an icon...