Word: pong
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Last year's biggest shopping fad was the electronic "pong" game that hooked up to a T.V. set to turn your living room into a reasonable fascimile of Father's Six. They're still around, of course, with even more kinds of games and a wider range of obnoxious little beeping noises. But as expected, the Christmas gift makers have come up with a new way to assail the television set this year...
Dumas was not alone in his fury. The French political journals, center and right, ravaged Courbet for years, and beside their vilifications the attacks on impressionism and cubism were mere Ping Pong. Such vehemence only rises from the conviction that art changes life: that painting has a public role...
Remember China's Ping Pong diplomacy? Its chief ambassador was Chuang Tse-tung, the three-time world table tennis champion (1961, 1963 and 1965) who is widely acknowledged to be one of the top players of all time. Chuang was dispatched with a Chinese team to the U.S. in 1972, as well as to Japan, Thailand and Malaysia, for the highly publicized matches that signaled Peking's desire to broaden its international ties...
Such is the travelogue romanticism that has dominated much Western reporting from China since the Ping Pong diplomacy days of 1972, when large numbers of visitors were admitted for the first time since the Communist takeover in 1949. Now, however, some revisionism is in vogue. In the past year such ideologically diverse American publications as Commentary (more and more conservative) and the New York Review of Books (still insistently liberal) have run pieces critical of conditions in China. The occasional U.S. journalist allowed into the country is more discerning than before about what he sees, thanks to a growing body...
MANY AMERICANS STILL derive a sort of childish glee from new developments in technology--microwave ovens, electric "pong" games and digital watches are a few examples. Advances in strategic weapons technology are no exception. Everyone knows that for each new weapon the Americans have developed, the Soviets have produced another one just as deadly, just as awesome. And people have also come to realize that efforts undertaken in the name of defense are invariably viewed by the other side as aggressive threats to stability requiring still further escalations of nuclear capability. But many Americans still maintain an implicit faith...