Word: moralizer
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...nation pulsed with music and proclamation, with rages and moral pretensions. "This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius," sang the cast of Hair, which came to Broadway in April. Janis Joplin expressed one side of the year fairly well: ecstatic and self-destructive simultaneously, wailing to the edges of the universe, flirting with the abyss. Joplin, who died of a heroin overdose in 1970, memorably sang Me and Bobbie McGee, the 1969 Kris Kristofferson song that contained a perfect line of 1968 philosophy, "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose...
Perhaps it is an immature impulse to wish for heroes. In the early '80s many of the young adopted the oldest American President, Ronald Reagan, as a kind of hero -- not a moral or political hero exactly, but rather a sort of hero of attitude, not a leader so much as a prince of nonchalance. That sort of hero does not nourish much, or perform the hero's function of inspiring people to be better, to do better...
...young men and women of the "movement," the antiwar and anti- Establishment young, had lost their voice in the political process. After Kennedy's death, Eugene McCarthy seemed to vanish from the moral horizon, even though he remained in the race. Hubert Humphrey had endured his long humiliation as Johnson's Vice President, and was the anointed...
Obviously, this process is complicated by the fact that the clubs are not officially affiliated with the university. In 1984, Harvard told the clubs they had to go co-ed or go private. The offer, while it allowed Harvard to claim the moral high ground, protected the clubs from the rigors of integration. That Harvard did not force its finals clubs to go co-ed suggests some rather dubious intentions on the part of the administrators responsible for student life...
...Hungry and Forgot His Manners, a novel that mugs New York while the city is still woozy from Wolfe's best-selling The Bonfire of the Vanities. Typically, Breslin is less concerned with the refinements of structure than with the shock effects of tabloid anecdote and an outraged moral tone. On the city's welfare system, for example: "The Poor are the most important people in New York, for their social welfare billions blow through the air for all the well-off to grab; where are the rich supposed to get their money from, the rich...