Word: modernes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...hills are alive, with the sound of bitching. "This most dismal of presidential campaigns," wailed Elizabeth Drew, in her most recent "Letter from Washington" in The New Yorker, ". . . has set a new low in modern campaigning." A few weeks earlier Page One of the New York Times's Week in Review gave the cartoon expression of this glum sentiment: Michael Dukakis and George Bush, pint-size brats, sticking their tongues out at each other in infantile fury. The 1988 election is, by general agreement, the dirtiest and dumbest election in recent memory, maybe ever...
Lighten up, everybody. This election is well within the normal range of modern American presidential contests -- which is to say, it is fairly ^ earnest, notably clean and even informative, if you know what to look for. A glance at the record dispels the notion that this election is peculiarly dirty or dishonest. Only eight years ago, the election was marred by loose, guilt- by-association swipes involving the Ku Klux Klan. The farther back you look, the worse it gets. In the Democratic-Republican propaganda of 1800, the Federalists were alleged to be cryptoroyalists and Anglomaniacs; the Federalists, in their...
...corps (numbering some 120 now) dutifully takes its place not far from enormous piles of corn that are being dumped onto the vast concrete acreage, then pushed by special dozers toward the trench that will catch the corn on conveyer belts and carry it with a kind of clanking Modern Times idiot ingenuity up a ramp to be mechanically husked and then borne inside the maw of the factory to its fate. So much corn has an unexpected rich barnyard kind of smell, a cloying excess of smell. Bush appears with his two oldest grandchildren, walks toward a monster mound...
...like a nightmare," she says. The new book, however, is intended to go beyond sympathy and outrage. "What interested me was what AIDS means for the way people think about illness," she explains. "One way for people to defend themselves against what is painful and frustrating in modern life is to have fantasies of disaster. AIDS is the latest script of that disaster...
...larger reflections. Her collected work is a map of her consuming passions: the French writer Roland Barthes, the German critic Walter Benjamin, the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard. (In her spare time, she has directed four films abroad.) All her work aims at defining a vaporous but crucial notion, the modern sensibility. She combines a metropolitan taste, omnivorous and hard to satisfy, with a transatlantic mind, drawn to European writers and filmmakers. Often she discusses them in the European form of fragments and epigrams. "I get impatient with linear forms in which you go from...