Word: mims
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...means, standard deviation and magnitude estimation, an American bases his SQ-status quotient-mainly on money. Although the statement seems self-evident, it is the ingeniously established bottom line to Sociologists Richard Coleman and Lee Rainwater's study of class in America, what their statistical Mr. Mim, the man-in-the-middle, likes to call his social standing. Yet the deeper one gets into the data and analysis of this book, the clearer it becomes that how Americans rank themselves is not a subject cashed in too quickly...
...reason is that Mr. Mim is sensitive and a little ambivalent about his SQ. He knows with the intuitive self-consciousness of the upwardly mobile that occupation, education, ethnic background and the concepts of social identity and life-style also count. Of course money talks. Indeed it whistles, hums and croons through the tangled switchboard of class lines that bind the conflicting emotions most Americans have about their place in an open, competitive society. What money says is "This way to the good life," not good as in Plato, but good as in "a good house in a good neighborhood...
...Before long, the townspeople's most precious possessions-including, eventually, children-fall under Dunsmore's hammer. Wisps of evil drift through the book, perceived through the eyes of the Moores, a proud old farming family. "You'll pay worse if you try to say no," warns Mim Moore. "Somebody-some head guy somewhere's bound to catch on and put the lid on the whole thing," a friend counters. "This is still America." But when Mim's husband John finally protests to the authorities, he is dismissed as a crank...
That was just what they wanted in Connecticut, too, where Republican Congressman Thomas Meskill will evict a Democrat from Hartford's gilt-domed statehouse after 16 years of one-party rule. Meskill, a former mayor of New Britain, came across forcefully on television. His opponent, Representative Emilio ("Mim") Daddario, who was once mayor of Middletown, "went through the campaign like a mummy," as one politico put it. Meskill accused the Democrats of doing nothing to curb drug abuse, which a specially commissioned G.O.P. state poll called the top issue on voters' minds. He capitalized on the $200 million...