Word: puritanical
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Cuisinarts, video-cassette recorders--and if you can't afford it, then you simply buy it on credit, borrow money, get a loan, try our EZ Payment plan, Master Charge it, put it on the tab, Leo--anything. It seems the inevitable extension of the consumer age. The old Puritan Ethic might have built this place, but it's the old play-now, pay-whenever attitude that keeps everything running. It's all very pleasant. New cars wall-to-wall, French-blended food, and Mork and Mindy whenever you want them--but there is a seedier side...
...between the third and the first person--"There comes a time in a man's life," he explains in the midst of crisis, "when he thinks of himself in the third person"--but never varies in his ribald, poetic, heart-driven rhetoric. Revolutionary and demagogue, seducer and saint, political puritan and sexual adventurer, he sees Kush as an extension of himself--a citadel of purity besieged by the persistent corruption of American capitalism and, worse, Western morals. He rejects it all, railing and carping in Updike's brilliant satirization of tunnel-eyed Marxist bombast, and secures his not-so-willing...
Seventeenth century artists depicted sober, stiff youngsters, dour in face, erect in posture, adult in demeanor. Life for a child in Puritan New England, after all, was a sobering proposition: one-half of all youngsters died before the age of ten, and those who survived were continually reminded that they had been born in sin and were doomed to hell if they did not submit to the commandments of parent and preacher. To adults, play was a manifestation of a depraved nature, and they tried to coerce their children into becoming models of rectitude. One dictum for raising properly passive...
Hookers, happy or otherwise, do not necessarily lack the puritan virtues of hard work, thrift and capital accumulation. Nevertheless, Lasch, a history professor at Rochester University, legitimately finds cracks of doom in our sanguinity. His thunderings shrivel our "ironic detachment," his term for a sense of humor...
Still, the official moralistic ethic-it might almost be called Puritan-prevails. China's leaders inveigh against the licentious life-style of the imperial past. When Mao's widow Chiang Ch'ing first came under attack, she was frequently portrayed as a latter-day Empress Wu Tse-t'ien, whose career began in the 7th century as a 13-year-old court concubine and ended in an orgy of sex and assassination. Another execrated royal personage is the 8th century Emperor Hsüan Tsung, who was hopelessly enamored of a shapely concubine, Yang Kuei...