Word: icon
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...decapitated the hat industry) to sports (touch football and 50-mile hikes) to dallying with movie stars (Marilyn Monroe suggestively cooing "Happy birthday, Mr. President"), Kennedy defined a style that was half Harvard and half James Bond. But J.F.K. spoke for a generation that craved a larger-than-life icon, a President who legitimized both its bravery in World War II and its man-in-the-gray-flannel-suit struggles to create the affluent society...
...first started staking out the cultural fringe, you dismissed any idea of a higher social agenda. We were told that "Papa Don't Preach" was "Just a song." And "Open Your Heart" was "just a video." Now we are supposed to believe that you have transformed yourself into an icon of social tolerance, a lighthouse, as it were, for the culturally disenfranchised...
TIME HAS BEEN SUCH AN ICON IN AMERICAN LIFE SINCE Its founding in 1923 that the magazine's cover frequently finds its way into other media. In the 1950 film A Woman of Distinction, for example, actress Rosalind Russell appears on a make-believe Time cover. More recently, Jack Nicholson and Kim Basinger could be seen in Batman perusing a Time cover...
...until the zeitgeist caught up with him and collaborator Robert Wilson a few years later. Since then, Glass has scored with such operas as Satyagraha (his masterpiece) and Akhnaten. But with the Met's imprimatur on The Voyage, Glass's long journey from obscure avant- gardist to mainstream cultural icon has been culminated...
...then Elvis died. A great career move, yes, but the death knell for the polity. Lacking an icon to unify the nation, successful candidates used symbols to divide and conquer. Reagan had his welfare queens, Bush his Willie Horton. That shit wouldn't fly when Elvis walked the earth...