Word: ism
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Which is, in the end, the only compelling case against the new gadgetry. When it was just a matter of spending too much time watching CNN and Who's the Boss? reruns, American couch-potato-ism was more amusing than depressing. But if the last remaining rich, secular public rituals -- shopping, moviegoing, browsing in the company of human strangers -- become reduced to solitary, freeze-dried experiences, we will have impoverished ourselves. The future, as it happens, will feel futuristic after all. But at least the Jetsons occasionally went out and mingled...
...season before Cronkite left through the season after, the network- news-watching majority withered abruptly, 77% to 68% in just two years, and not because of CNN, which barely existed. Instead, it was simply the moment the nation, released by Cronkite's passing and Reagan's ignorance-is-bliss- ism, started abandoning the nightly-news ritual. Today 1 in 2 Americans over 50 still tunes in one of the network shows. But among adults under 35, barely 1 in 13 watches Brokaw or Jennings or Rather. And Connie Chung is not likely to change that...
...return to the czarist monarchy and unabashedly proud of its fascist symbolism. Its members blame most of the country's ills on "people of alien ethnic origin," and refuse to ally themselves with any communists. Declares Pamyat president Dmitri Vasiliev: "No democratic, no communist system or any other ism will be able to stop this irresistible drive toward purification and freedom...
...squares of now cracking paint. French gallerygoers 100 years ago never felt like this about the art of the French Revolution. Jacques-Louis David looked old-fashioned by then, whereas Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, El Lissitzky, Alexander Rodchenko, Liubov Popova and all their colleagues in the ism soup of the Russian artistic vanguard still look fresh and daring...
...works of his more prosaic mid-century contemporaries. Devoutly Catholic, the French composer was blessed with a pagan sense of muscular rhythm and luminous color. Highly intellectual, he was also irredeemably mystical, taking an almost childlike pleasure in the sounds of nature, especially bird song. He followed no "ism" and founded no school, but Messiaen, who died in April at 83, looms as one of the century's giants...