Word: paranoias
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...champion cliché word in the contemporary lexicon is paranoia. Like most clichés, it gained its currency from actual conditions. A tragic example is an incident that took place in a Chicago supermarket parking lot. David Munoz, 10, earned soda-pop and movie money by carrying grocery bags to customers' cars. As he was crossing the parking area carrying loaded bags, he passed an armored truck. Inside was a guard, Ronald Brannan, who was waiting for his partner to pick up the supermarket receipts...
...boss, President Robert Wilson of the Armored Express Corp., that he and his partner were being harassed by several teenagers, that he stuck the revolver through the porthole to warn them off, and that the gun fired accidentally. Munoz died two days later, a casualty of fear-or paranoia...
...gone the route from private inrage to public outrage. It is not easy to write a regional novel in a homogenizing world. Barry Hannah, 29, has managed it the first time out by combining his special place, the American South of the 1960s, with the mood of paranoia that took root during that violent decade...
...Piranesi's work, is (for all its exaggerations) measurable. In the Prisons it is not. No imaginative effort can deduce a real building from these scribbled and echoing crypts, with their swinging cables, their proliferating vaults and huge iron grilles: one imagines Piranesi, gripped by some mastering paranoia, trying to stabilize it and give it a "real" form. In the 18th century, opium was the usual medicine for fever, and perhaps the Carceri were inspired by it; certainly their feeling of limitless dread, of imprisonment by infinite space, pertains to opium experience. Hence Piranesi's interest for some...
...perhaps he would think this is clearly too much. Science fiction is popular culture and expressive in its own special way. Didn't the great monster movies of the fifties embody perfectly the Joe McCarthy, shadow-of-the-bomb paranoia of a whole nation? Why, in a society where the future and its shocks come more and more quickly, shouldn't caricature of the future reveal as much as one of the present...