Word: mainstream
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Dukakis' recent silence has been criticized as a reluctance to fight back. But the very nature of Bush's attack is designed to induce silence. To challenge one's Americanness is to point out one's differences from the mainstream...
Bush praises his running mate Dan Quayle on the peculiar grounds that he "damn sure never burned the American flag," as if Dukakis or Lloyd Bentson or anyone in mainstream public life ever did. Meanwhile, other Republicans spread the baseless rumor that there are photographs of Kitty Dukakis burning the flag. If Bush thinks that kind of thing has no place in the campaign, he lacks the gallantry to say so. He also lacks the candor to say straight out about his opponent what he suggests by innuendo...
...such luck. Irving has for a dozen years commuted easily between stage (Amadeus, The Road to Mecca) and screen (Carrie, Yentl), but movies have rarely caught her witchy allure. Arquette seemed a cinch for stardom after Desperately Seeking Susan, but her elfin sensuality has proved too weird for mainstream fare. As for the wondrous Winger, she anchored three big hits of the early '80s. But after Urban Cowboy, An Officer and a Gentleman and Terms of Endearment, her career loitered. Nobody saw Mike's Murder; nobody needed to see Legal Eagles. She was outglammed by Theresa Russell in Black Widow...
There are, of course, enclaves in a lot of American cities that feel foreign because one group or another clings to a way of life that originated in some other country. In New Orleans the mainstream can have foreign ways. No one who ever took a close look at Mardi Gras could come away with the impression that it's merely a straightforward American spectacle in the tradition of, say, the Indianapolis 500 or the Pasadena Tournament of Roses. In 1964 I was in New Orleans to do a piece on the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club, a black...
ELLWOOD'S book provides a corrective to many of the current myths, liberal and conservative, about why welfare doesn't work. In particular, he pleads the case for understanding the poor as a part of mainstream American society, and not the ghettoized, isolated group that it is often perceived to be. Less than 10 percent of American poor live in the ghettos, as Ellwood reminds his readers...