Word: mania
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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This decade mania is getting out of hand. Pundits had barely finished figuring out what distinguished the '80s from the '70s (now what was that difference again?) when they set about trying to characterize the '90s, a decade still in diapers: the "get real" decade; the Nervous '90s. How about the Name-Obsessed...
...mentality of addiction, of alcoholism, prevails in zones of American life even when no drugs are involved. Americans are addicted to television, a true enslavement, a dreary mania. When diversion is all, real life vanishes. Americans are addicted to the consumption of energy, to profligate plastics and convenience power in all its fuming, humming expressions -- cars, motorboats, air conditioners, home appliances. They are addicted to credit and debt, to mobility, to high speed. The American addictions tend to have this in common: a hope of painlessness...
This reductio ad absurdum of TV's talk-show mania has had funny sequences, like Jim Belushi joining in an inept neighborhood game of charades: while the women whiz through titles like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the men are stumped by Jaws. But the Hollywood-meets-the-heartland satire falls a little flat. My Talk Show is too straitlaced and good-natured; it needs a bit of the rudeness of Late Night with David Letterman. Or at least some quirkier performers. Where have you gone, Louise Lasser...
...LIST-O-MANIA...
Thus for the fourth time in five years Washington had failed to produce a budget by its own, self-imposed deadline. All concerned concede that Washington-style budgetmaking is a disgrace. Ideas for rationalizing the process, to curb both spending mania and cliff-hanging melodrama, have been as numerous as attempts to cure the common cold -- and just as ineffectual...