Word: mythicize
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...mythic figures forever identified with the American landscape are the itinerant evangelist and the salesman on the road. Right now, John Bradshaw, 58, is both. It is a Sunday afternoon, and for the second day he stands before an enthralled crowd at Manhattan's main convention center. All of us, he tells them, had traumatic childhoods and from them spring the unresolved anxieties of adulthood. He plays the theme in masterly fashion: the faithful are spellbound...
...stir our souls because we have attached our deepest feelings to the myths and documents of our founding: Paul Revere's ride and George Washington at Valley Forge; the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Democracies that lack such myths can be emotionally naked. A constitutional monarch supplies the mythic dimension in a convenient package. Winston Churchill, who was both a partisan pol and an ardent monarchist, believed that if defeated Germany had had a constitutional monarch after World War I, the Weimar Republic might have withstood the seductions of Nazism...
...rhythms are irresistible, his lyrics like an amalgam of Yeats, Kerouac and Chuck Berry. The Irish tenor John McCormack said what distinguishes an important voice from a good one is the indescribable but crucial quality that he termed "the yarrrrragh." The yarrrrragh, critic Greil Marcus points out, is "a mythic incantation . . . To Morrison ((it is)) the gift of the muse and the muse itself...
Initially, the strategy produced one success after another, contributing to American Express's almost mythic reputation for savviness and invincibility. But a recent chain of misfortunes, miscues and poor managerial decisions is prompting a reappraisal of Amex's sterling reputation. Acquisitions that looked like masterstrokes only a few years ago are now facing criticism; the managerial decision-making process that was once considered fine-tuned and flawless is suddenly being second-guessed; businesses that were thought to be impervious to economic downturns have proved to be vulnerable after all. In short, American Express is showing that it has chinks...
...once a network staple (and the genre has made a modest comeback recently, with such shows as Paradise and The Young Riders), and a small handful of hit series have been set in the past. But these shows were mainly interested in using the past for its symbolic or mythic value. The Minnesota frontier of Little House on the Prairie and the Depression-era South of The Waltons were essentially the same locale: an all-American Everyplace, where ethical issues and family dramas could be worked out against an idealized backdrop, far from the messy moral ambiguities of modern days...