Word: monumentalism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Belching diesel exhaust, 6,500 tractors lumbered along a Georgia interstate last weekend, bound for Atlanta. Meanwhile, eight "tractorcades" rumbled into Topeka, Kans., and similar demonstrations occurred in a dozen more Midwestern state capitals. In Washington, D.C., 600 tractors and other farm vehicles gathered near the Washington Monument. Across the country, farmers were rallying to show that they were ready to strike in order to force prices higher. Their motto: "No more producing, no more selling and no more buying...
...land became choked and glutted with the unwanted and untouched presents that kept coming out of The Santa Corporation's plants by the truckload. And while the company kept spewing out holiday paraphernalia like a merry-go-round with no brakes, the Clausists erected a tremendous monument outside the gates of the comapny's main factory. They built high and strong an image of Santa Claus, the long-dead manic sleigh jockey who had become their symbol. And on the pedestal of the figure, they inscribed a long-forgotten and poorly-understood poem that one of the ancients had written...
Millenia later, archaeologists would uncover the monument's base, minus the colossal figure, which had long since toppled after being worn down by the wind and the rain. Santaland had of course gone into decline, after The Santa Corporation slowed in its purposeless gyrations and finally stopped producing entirely...
...result of different levels of intelligence. The Hampshire freshman probably had much the same intellectual capacities as her classmates. It is a question of culture. The fact that so many very bright people from tightly-knit communities cling to so many values and traditions of dubious rationality is a monument to the incredible power of their communities to shape their outlooks on life...
...Weak, vain, pushing, curious, garrulous" - as Macaulay described him-Boswell nevertheless produced the most vivid and exhaustive biographical portrait in literature. Modern biographers have before them a daunting monument, the quotable Johnson of old age, living in picturesque squalor, holding forth on any topic. He was "the greatest talker in the history of the English language," Bate claims. And how simple it would have been just to elaborate on that legend: the proud writer dining behind a screen because he was ashamed of his tattered clothes; the compulsive walker in the streets of London who had to touch each lamppost...