Word: progressiveness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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These cathedral spires of the highway were gaudy advertisements for an America that owned three-quarters of the earth's cars. Automobiles were the symbols as well as the vehicles of individual and national progress, so why shouldn't Americans have the most ostentatious models--with new fins each year? At the height of fin fashion, American cars (with sticker prices about the cost of a Levittown house) resembled the pagoda-shouldered pottery courtesans in Tang dynasty tombs--exotica from a lost age of extravagance. The 1958 recession sent the style into decline. Fin de siecle...
...undeniable progress, the black middle class still seems poised on the banks of the mainstream rather than swimming in its current. Its members are haunted by a feeling of alienation from the white majority with which they have so much in common. They speak again and again of "living in two worlds." In one they are judged by their credentials and capabilities. In the other, race still comes first...
Through narrative and personality, analysis and synthesis, we try to make a complex world more coherent. The ultimate goal is to help make sure that the chaotic tumble of progress does not outpace our moral processing power...
...TIME's cover stories, led by the writing of the great James Agee (excerpted earlier in this issue), focused on the dropping of the atom bomb. Later in that issue, in a new section called Atomic Age, TIME wrestled with the historic and moral implications of what passed for progress: Pain and a price attended progress. The last great convulsion brought steam and electricity, and with them an age of confusion and mounting war. A dim folk memory had preserved the story of a greater advance: "the winged hound of Zeus" tearing from Prometheus' liver the price of fire...
Nevertheless, the prejudice that we most firmly share with Luce and Hadden is a fundamental optimism. For them, optimism--a faith in progress--was not just a creed, it was a tactic for making things better. The challenges of a new millennium as well as today's fin-de-siecle scandals require that reporters be skeptical. But we must avoid the journalistic cynicism--as a pose, as a sophomoric attitude--that reigned in the '70s and '80s. Intelligent skepticism can, and should, be compatible with a basic belief in progress and a faith in humanity's capacity for common sense...