Word: reiche
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...creator, Charles A. Reich, is a professor of law at Yale. He offers the rules, and defines the three categories, in a new book called The Greening of America (Random House; $7.95) that is attracting major attention. The game will be won, says Reich, when enough of his fellow citizens enter Consciousness III. Then a change of heart and spirit will set in all over America, the sterile, gray industrial landscape will grow greener, and all our life-suppressing institutions will be peaceably transformed from within...
...Reich's three categories are first presented historically as stages in a familiar pageant entitled, "How America went wrong . . . and the rebirth of human values that is emerging in the new generation." For Reich weighs the American past and finds it wanton. The Consciousness I period is associated with the young Jeffersonian Republic-freedom-loving, egalitarian, expansive, democratic, though lamentably competitive. Its spirit stifled slowly, as America evolved into another political caricature, the pinched, repressive, committee-loving, life-suppressing, reform-minded meritocracy, which Reich seems to regard as something very like Hell on Earth. Decisive moments in this decline...
Plaints and Visions. Consciousness I people, Reich observes, still persist and still see America as if it were a world of small towns and simple virtues. The membership includes "farmers, A.M.A.-type doctors, gangsters, Republicans and 'just plain folks,'" plus -one assumes-a Vice President or two. The folks in Consciousness II tend to be young doctors, idealistic lawyers, Kennedy men, believers in the New York Times editorial page, as well, presumably, as Ralph Nader and all his raiders. Unlike Consciousness I, Consciousness II people are aware of the erosion of the American Dream. But they are equally...
...Reich, the hope of the present and the wave of the future is Consciousness III. There were a few early IIIs before the mid-1960s: among them Thoreau, James Joyce, Wallace Stevens, J.D. Salinger. But now there are thousands, says Reich, eager to transform American society by a new, generous life-style and a direct commitment to simplicity, honesty and gentle comradeship. The revolution will be peaceable too, for anyone who believes in power and violence, says Reich, is not yet up to Consciousness III. Instead, Reich sees the young simply infiltrating and then inheriting the future. "The new consciousness...
...visions, as in his plaints, Reich is a peculiar blend of Vance Packard and Pollyanna, a colloidal suspension of William Buckley, William Blake and Herbert Marcuse in pure applesauce. It can be justly said of Reich, as Dr. Johnson once said of Thomas Gray, that "he was dull, but he was dull in a new way, and that made people think him great...