Word: idealize
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Researchers have long suspected that heredity plays a role in some if not all cases, and the Amish present an ideal setting in which to test that hypothesis. Not only does bipolar behavior contrast sharply with the community's quiet ways, making it easy to diagnose, but a number of confounding factors that might contribute to such behavior are absent: alcoholism, drug abuse, unemployment, divorce and violence are extremely rare. In addition, the Amish have large families (seven children on average) and keep genealogical records worthy of Mendel. Best of all, they represent a closed genetic pool...
...kinds of parlors and into the mainstream. No longer an embarrassing reminder of those touchy-feely human potential movements of the '70s, massage is fast emerging as Americans' favorite antidote to that current cultural Grinch: stress. Nothing kinky, just a way to get out the kinks. "It's the ideal therapy for the '80s," declares Robert King, president of the Chicago-based American Massage Therapy Association. "Instead of having an extra martini or gulping Valium, people ought to consider a professional massage...
...sermonizing mother's penchant for moral crusading, Reagan articulates and seems to embody values Americans prize most. He can josh with an audience and then preach to them. Self-deprecating, humble, unpretentious, charming and--most importantly--a financial and social success, Reagan stands as the "fulfillment of America's ideal--Everyman suddenly put in charge of the nation's destiny, the good-hearted non-professional with `common-sense...
...they? "He is the ideal past, the successful present, the hopeful future all in one," Wills answers in his new book. Ironically, he gave a more elaborate and satisfactory explanation of the rise of Reagan in his 1970 work, Nixon Agonistes. That book portrayed Richard Nixon as the ultimate embodiment of the go-getting, self-reliant individual mythologized in classical liberalism--Woodrow Wilson's "man on the make...
...Nixon is the proper spokesmen for [this American] ethos, then nothing could prove better how shrunken, small, how unheroic that ideal is. This politics will not summon us with trumpets. The tone of our public life is not the old one--"These qualities made America the great country it is, and we must be true to them." The present tone is "these qualities made the country what it is, and we must settle for them...