Word: kudzu
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Wasn't that a time? Each year of the early 1960s brought new images of heroism and horror as the civil rights movement spread through the South like kudzu. 1960: four Negro students sit in at a Greensboro, N.C., lunch counter. 1961: the Congress of Racial Equality inaugurates its Freedom Rides to integrate Southern bus terminals. 1962: in Oxford, Miss., James Meredith enters Ole Miss, its first black student since Reconstruction...
Brace yourself, Bill, you are in summer White House country now. Weird things happen. Remember Plains, Ga.? "If anyone spent a dime there, that was an improvement over the year before," sniffs Ward. True enough. Plains shot into the limelight with Jimmy Carter and sunk back into the kudzu like Brigadoon. Then there was Hyannis, Mass., which metamorphosed from a decent summer community into the world capital of turquoise John F. Kennedy ashtrays. The place has never recovered from the combination of Kennedy mystique, weak zoning and bad taste...
Anyway, Linda Henry (Theresa Russell) does. She looks around at models of the '80s American male and wonders what options are available. The four-wheel drivel of the macho man with emotional brutality stitched in his heart? No thanks, that species grew like kudzu in her small Southern town. How about the spinning wheels of the upscale drudge, playing with his toy trains and his whiny mistress? Nope, Linda's got one too many of those already: her husband, Dr. Henry Henry (Christopher Lloyd). His idea of smooth talk is bedtime baby talk...
...seem to have much to do with the city of Atlanta; some of them have hardly ever been there. Doug Marlette, the editorial cartoonist of the Atlanta Constitution, has been one of those lamenting the gentrification and homogenization and suburbanization of the city. In his comic strip, Kudzu, Marlette sums up what is happening in one evocative word: Bubbacide...
Joyce's otherwise informative memoir is marred by its self-serving tone, and his credibility is damaged by the dubious reconstruction of quotes, many of which make him sound suspiciously articulate. (Talking about Rather to a colleague: "Jesus, he's become like that ornamental vine from Japan, the kudzu, that was introduced in Georgia a few years ago. Now it's spread its tendrils all over the whole damned South . . .") What is more, Joyce rarely steps back from his day-to-day chronology to offer a larger perspective about TV news or even much useful introspection...