Word: rootlessness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Frank Rich's review of Frederick Wiseman's PBS film Canal Zone [Oct. 10] does a great injustice to Canal Zone residents. Specifically, I refer to such statements as "Zonians, for all their manic patriotic ardor, are a rootless and unhappy lot; their crime rate and child-abuse rates are well above the mainland rates...
Wiseman reveals that the Zonians, for all their manic patriotic ardor, are a rootless and unhappy lot; their crime and child-abuse rates are well above the mainland rates. Canal Zone thus becomes a study in how Americanism when isolated and left to feed on itself can become a desperate form of mass escapism-and, as such, it is an ingenious cautionary tale. -Frank Rich
...American Graffiti Lucas did more than that. He worked out his entire adolescence. Set in Modesto, Calif, where he grew up, the film is the perfect image of bored, rootless teen-agers in 1962, the year he finished high school. Says Lucas: "I spent my teen years cruising McHenry Avenue in Modesto." At that time his only ambition was to race cars, but a near-fatal crash two days before graduation forced him to spend three months in a hospital. When he came out, he decided to go to college. After two years at Modesto Junior College, he entered...
...than pride in place is a strongly developed sense of family-not merely the nuclear one, but the broadsword virtues of the clan. This is partly because many Southern families have lived in the same territory for five or six generations, growing, spreading, developing deeper ties. To a largely rootless and mobile nation, children or grandchildren of the immigrant experience, this familial feeling seems foreign. Explains Spalding: "It is comforting for a Southerner, in a strange, hostile and wicked world, to know who he is, that someone will send his daughter a wedding present or come to his funeral...
...Connor died in 1964. In retrospect, that date looks like the end of a literary era. If so, was it because the modern Snopesian world of rootless mechanical men and heartless financiers had finally, as Faulkner was always predicting, done in the South? Or was it that creation flagged once deprived of one powerful, catalytic genius? Whatever the reason, Southern writing today, at the moment of what may be that region's first national triumph in over 100 years, seems stalled between the glorious past and an uncertain future. The past, in fact, has become a burden...