Word: rah
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...remember my first encounter with Harvard: I was about five, opening Christmas presents. An overeager aunt of mine bough me a Peanuts sweatshirt. There was Snoopy, dressed in a Harvard sweater, leaning on a football, and holding a pennant. The banner read, "Rah...
...Spirit Committee, which is thinking of providing proctors with cassettes of school songs, must think that first-years are prime targets for rah-rah Harvard mania...
...athletes began parading past, chaperoned by rhyming verse in English and French, the rah-rah doggerel gave the presentation promenade something of the air of a Miss Universe contest (finding rhymes for "Latvia" and "Cypriot" must surely qualify as an Olympic-style suicide mission). During the ensuing pageantry, classical romanticism was offset with futuristic whimsy. The air of playful modernity, dreamed up by Philippe Decoufle, a 30- year-old high school dropout who talks of getting ideas while asleep, conjured up a Mademoiselle France who was fresh, lighthearted and a little bit spacy...
This outpouring of American pride--pride in our technological superiority (Rah Patriot Missile), in our brilliant military (Rah 100-hour war), in our humanity (Rah No Civilian Targets), in our racial equity (Rah Colin Powell, Rah Blacks and whites in the trenches), in our democratic ideals (Rah Restoring the Elected and Legitimate Government of the Freedom-Loving People of Kuwait)--has been a successful diversion of our attention from pressing economic issues...
...worst flaw may be a rah-rah jingoism that informs some of his pieces, like the one in which he cheers the fall of the Berlin Wall. "The privileges of liberty and the sanctity of the individual went out and kicked some butt," he says. Or it may be that he feels no compunction to propose any answers to the problems he raises. Or perhaps it's that he often invokes the "I'm-just-kidding" defense as an all-purpose shield. But, hey, who can hold a grudge for long against a guy who explains that the Ottoman Empire...