Word: rootlessness
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...more. Even in today's hack westerns, dynamic forces are at work. The old settler vs. Indians and ranchers crises have been multiplied: brothels vs. churches, robber barons vs. entrepreneurs, California and Texas vs. Mexico (as last outpost frontiers), and one theme above them all-the cussing, whoring, rootless, indomitable old rider (be he gunslinger or lawman) vs. the encroaching complexity of modern society...
...Americans. That comes as no surprise to Social Critic Vance Packard. The song became popular, Packard believes, because it poignantly reflects the pain and yearning of a nation on the move. America has become a land of nomads, he says, a nation of men and women who are rootless, isolated, indifferent to community problems, shallow in personal relationships and afflicted with "unconnectedness and a lonely coldness...
...down the freeway lulled by Carmen McRae, by the air whistling to get out the window crack, by the distant hum of the tires, zip past the palms and the houses at a standstill in the sun and float on the air on your shocks, free, rootless, just going-like the girl in Joan Didion's Play It as It Lays. You become a skier out here, your times off the freeway being mere chili stops at the bottom, breathless, charged, waiting for another move...
There was a time in the stone age before the Beatles, as Pop Critic Richard Goldstein once put it, when everybody under 20 seemed to be searching for the "perfect wave." Along with hot-rods and sports cars, surfboards had become both means and metaphor for the new, rootless mobility of the American young. In Southern California especially, sunning, surfing, chasing chicks, gobbling Cha-Cha burgers, even watching TV became life values worth celebrating...
Many of the Processeans come from the same drug-strewn, rootless backgrounds from which the Jesus people have fled. But The Process preaches more psychological self-realization than faith. One of the movement's key practices is a weekly telepathy session in which "contact and communication" are emphasized in much the same way as they are in encounter therapy. At the core of Processean psychology is the gloomy and negative conviction that human enterprise is a futile escape from the painful contradictions of a world in which most men are pawns in the game of the gods. Only...