Word: midwesternizing
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Marlon Brando's emergence in the early '50s registered a drastic change in the cultural weather. The masculine ideal reflected in the Hollywood mirror had been basically suave and gentlemanly. Brando, who grew up middle class, Midwestern and Wasp, radiated pure working-class alienation -- an inarticulate promise of danger, sex and social abrasion. Which is why, as TIME film critic Richard Schickel tells us in BRANDO: A LIFE IN OUR TIMES (Atheneum; $21.95), he was a mythic presence for all the young urban professionals of the '50s. Rude but sensitive, rough but anguished, Brando was their version of pastoral...
...goal in his quest is a kingliness, a regal self-possession. Bly looks kingly enough at moments as he sits in his new Minneapolis house -- a handsome, substantial Midwestern paterfamilias place that he has just acquired. He divides his time among this house, another on Minnesota's Moose Lake and stops on his lecture tours. The Minneapolis house feels cleansed of ghosts and even gentrified. A poet named Louis Jenkins (author of a splendid collection called All Tangled Up with the Living and other books) is doing some work around the place for Bly and emerges from the basement from...
Many executives are adopting a show-me attitude. Says William Weiss, chairman of Ameritech, a Baby Bell phone company that serves five Midwestern states: "Despite what the Fed chairman says, I don't sense that business feels any strong sense of recovery. The government may have to play the role of cheerleader, but I wouldn't be as optimistic. We still have deep liquidity and credit problems that make it increasingly difficult for businesses to finance their way back...
...mediocre grades in high school, a daughter born out of wedlock and 17 tickets for speeding and unsafe driving. It quoted an anonymous friend's assertion that the woman had "a little wild streak." For good measure, it detailed her mother's divorce and remarriage to a wealthy Midwestern industrialist...
...good running mate for Gore would be Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey, whose Congressional Medal of Honor and loss of a leg in Vietnam would preempt any perceptions of softness on national defense. His "down-home" Midwestern image will retain the Democrats' traditional strength in Minnesota and Michigan...