Word: peacenik
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...forms. The word politician, which may carry enough downbeat connotation for most tastes, can be given additional unsavoriness by truncation: pol. By prefacing liberal and conservative with ultra or arch, both labels can be saddled with suggestions of inflexible fanaticism. To speak of a pacifist or peacemaker as a peacenik is, through a single syllable, to smear someone with the suspicion that he has alien loyalties. The antifeminist who wishes for his (or her) prejudice to go piggyback on his (or her) language will tend to speak not of feminists but of fern-libbers. People with only limited commitments...
...opening a national dialogue on ways to control and reduce the awesome and frightening nuclear arsenals of the superpowers. This new awareness of the dangers of nuclear war cuts across traditional political boundaries. Advocates of a bilateral freeze on the development and deployment of nuclear weapons include some peacenik activists who led protests against U.S. involvement in the Viet Nam War a decade ago. But the new movement is far more broadly based; it includes more bishops than Berrigans, doctors and lawyers with impeccable Establishment credentials, archconservatives as well as diehard liberals, and such knowledgeable experts as retired Admiral Noel...
...with the idea that Afghanistan may turn out to be the Soviet Union's Viet Nam-never mind that Afghanistan is right on the Soviet border and that whatever else the leaders in Moscow have to worry about, they need not fear student marches on the Kremlin or peacenik political challengers in the next elections to the Supreme Soviet...
...basic reason for the vets' postwar distress is that they were not allowed to win the war. The media provided the ammunition (albeit defective) that the peacenik militants used to label our men baby killers and monsters of all kinds. There was little or no mention by the press and TV of enemy atrocities, which were commonplace, or defeats (Tet). The war was probably journalism's lowest point...
...making this reformulation? A handful of liberal theologians? Rifkin himself admits the change is virtually unnoticed. One spectacular example is Billy Graham's conversion from nuke-the-Russian-Antichrist-cold-warrior to disarmament-peacenik-one-worlder, but Graham knows he is in a very small minority. Is the Full Gospel Businessmen's Fellowship likely to abandon the profit margin for a few more trees and whales just because Rifkin thinks the charismatics should pick up this redefinition as their marching banner? If anything, the Pentecostal revival is a reaction against the new values, against social innovations and moral liberalizations...