Word: puritans
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...struggle for the American soul was settled once and almost for all. Score: Ants, 1; Grasshoppers, 0. The devil had been unmasked as the imp of play, the demon who made song and dance the pulsebeat of life. And so the men in the gray Puritan suits went their unmerry way: sober, industrious, thrifty, starkly Protestant, with absolutely no use for Maypoles. For Maypoles meant not only untrammeled festivity but something of larger significance: rituals. And rituals meant not only feelings and passions but coded repetitions of the past -things that New Man had come to the New World...
...firm, but it was not, and could not have been, final. As Philosopher George Santayana, looking at the American Puritan through half-Spanish eyes, noted: "For the moment, it is certainly easier to suppress the wild impulses of our nature than to manifest them fitly, at the right times and with the proper fugitive emphasis; yet in the long run, suppression does not solve the problem, and meantime those maimed expressions which are allowed are infected with a secret misery and falseness." Nearly 31 centuries later, the Merry Mount case no longer seems so open and shut. Not only could...
...condoning homosexuality, endorsing masturbation-a sneaky death blow at the heart of America: the Family. The Pros, on the other hand, saw the experiment as education at the point of salvation. "Stamp Out Neurosis" was the invisible banner every Pro waved. Sex education promised to free America from its puritan hang-ups-and about time...
...Hawthorne's allegorical short story, Young Goodman Brown, the ingenuous Puritan wanders into the forest one dark night and catches all his friends, neighbors and saintly village elders in mortal sin-in this case devil worship. It might have been just a dream, but it made a lifelong cynic of young Brown. Much the same thing happened not long ago to a young reporter named Charley Thompson, who wandered into Jacksonville. Fla. The sin was not devil worship but pollution, a suitable modern equivalent. And it was no dream...
...fact is, however, that he may not be as emancipated as he believes. Enter, quietly, the new anxiety that dares not breathe its name. The reverse puritan takes his pleasure as aggressively as he once took his work. Having fun has become his new duty. "Feel!" has become the new moral imperative. The original puritan denied the feelings he had. The reverse puritan boasts of feelings he does not have, writing rubber checks on love in capital letters. Captive to a new perfectionism, he flagellates himself equally for his marginal failures at orgasm and for his secret indifference toward minorities...