Word: pendulum
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...animated the '60s has been repudiated by the revisionism of the sedentary '80s. The interplay between Ronald Reagan and shifting cultural attitudes has created a new orthodoxy of patriotism and restraint: Viet Nam (a noble if tragic cause), drugs (just say no) and sex (play it safe). As the pendulum swings to the right, woe betide any baby-boom politician who spent the '60s doing anything more daring than swallowing goldfish and doing the Frug. Before the nation gives way to a new slogan, "Don't Trust Anyone Under 45," it is fitting to ask what are the appropriate standards...
Murphy is most convincing when he tries to put the Fortas affair into a historical context, rather than a crassly political one. He notes that Fortas fell victim to what amounted to a swing of the pendulum in American politics, when the "whales" of the Senate saw their power pass away to a younger generation and when the liberalism of LBJ and JFK was replaced by a conservatism of which we may only now be seeing the last vestiges...
Both, too, were profoundly out of fashion for most of the 1970s and '80s, during the era of ferocious antimodernist reaction. But now the pendulum is swinging back again, which may account for this week's eleventh-hour attempt to rehabilitate two modernist reputations at once. Neither prizewinner is interested in making a pretense of mellowness. In the acceptance speech he prepared for his daughter to read, Niemeyer disparaged a "minor architecture made with a ruler and square" and, a bit self-servingly, endorsed the "search for the spectacular." The more plainspoken Bunshaft dismisses apostates and revels in his sense...
...have noticed in the last couple of years a new impulse on this campus. There is a renewed interest in the 1960s. Students are beginning to develop a new sense of progressive politics. The political pendulum is swinging back," Thelwell says...
Whether we thought him ruthless or saintly (yes, the pendulum swung that widely) didn't really matter. Once in the race, Bobby Kennedy was the story. We launched what was to become a blur of flights, motorcades, voters pawing candidate, and motels for five, occasionally six, hours a night. First it was in Kansas, where Alf Landon gave him a surprisingly warm introduction. Then on to Tennessee. Crowds were huge, no surprise considering Bobby's celebrity. But they were also friendly. We even went to Alabama, George Wallace country, then to Indiana, where, just before the deadline, Kennedy officially entered...