Word: shock
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...capitalism also proved to be a disruptive force on an equally gigantic scale. It subjected humanity to the psychological shock of living with continuous and accelerating technological and social change. The Industrial Revolution covered Europe and America with what Smith's contemporary, Poet William Blake, called "dark Satanic mills," wiping out cottage industry and jamming workers into ugly new factory towns. Though the purchasing power of factory workers began to rise slowly, a father's earnings were often insufficient to support a family. Children as young as eight worked as much as 14 hours a day in the mills...
...Story lines constantly interweave; historical figures become part of fictional events and fictional characters participate in real history. In ways both fantastic and poetically convincing, the members of a suburban upper-middle-class family combine and change in the undertow of events. As if Clarence Day had written Future Shock into Life with Father, Doctorow's images and improvisations foreshadow the 20th century's coming preoccupation with scandal, psychoanalysis, solipsism, race, technological power and megalomania...
Rather than probation, such offenders in non-felony cases would serve a prescribed term of as little as a week up to six months, including the possibility of doing their time on weekends or nights so that work or school opportunities would not be lost. Short "shock treatment" sentences have been used successfully in Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky; the claimed benefit is that prisoners get the rectifying jolt of prison without the dehumanization of long exposure to prison life, and there has been a lower than average recidivism rate...
Fresh Air. The aborigines, who called themselves Tasaday (pronounced Taw-sawdai), did well to tremble. The most primitive human beings so far discovered on this guilty planet had turned to face the 20th century. There was culture shock on both sides. The Tasaday discovered evil; the rest of us discovered good in a form so pure it seemed almost incredible to a civilization that had long since abandoned Rousseau's conception of the Noble Savage. Biblically reminded that "the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked," assured by anthropologists that Homo sapiens is descended from a killer...
Jaws, which opens in 490 theaters this week, is part of a bracing revival of high adventure films and thrillers over the past few months (see box page 44). It is expensive ($8 million), elaborate, technically intricate and wonderfully crafted, a movie whose every shock is a devastating surprise. Like Earthquake, it takes a panic-producing disaster and shows how a representative cross section of humanity responds to it. Like The Exorcist, it deals with an essentially unknowable, therefore unpredictable and thoroughly spooky symbol of evil. Jaws promises to hit right in the old collective unconscious and to draw millions...