Word: pendulums
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...pendulum swung last Sunday night, as it may several times again before the election. Michael Dukakis, whose campaign had been moribund since the Democratic Convention, reasserted his voice at the first of two 90-minute showdowns -- and while his overconfident debater's style may be grating, he consistently displayed his mastery of both the forensic arts and substance. George Bush, while certainly the warmer and more user-friendly of the two, appeared at the same time to be hesitant, disconnected and too often on the defensive...
...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...