Word: shrills
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Communist world was predictably condemnatory. In Moscow, a statement was signed by 24 Soviet intellectuals, including Composer Dmitri Shostakovich and Nobel Physicist Nikolai Semenov. The words chosen by these brilliant men were singularly shrill: "The U.S. military followed in the tracks of the Nazi criminals." In East Germany, about 50,000 youths gathered to protest the American presence in Viet Nam. The Peking press made do with reprinting the official Hanoi government line berating the U.S. for killing "suckling babies and disemboweling pregnant women...
...Paint. Beyond racial harangues (including a shrill appearance by Black Manifesto Author James Forman), the more than 500 delegates heard a long, high-pitched debate on the war and the draft. After the assembly decided not to "accept custody" of the draft card of a 20-year-old delegate, Episcopal Priest Dick York of the Berkeley Free Church told the council that it had blood on its hands. York walked along the officers' table, splashing red paint on their papers. Next day, however, delegates voted overwhelmingly in favor of a resolution defending critics of the Viet...
Altered Mood. While shrill contentiousness is something of a novelty in the Nixon Administration, it is scarcely a tactic new to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Franklin Roosevelt rounded on "economic royalists" and Harry Truman on the "do-nothing 80th Republican Congress" in deliberate attempts to polarize the U.S. electorate, and both were critical of what was said about them in print. Now, as then, the news media tend to be thin-skinned and quick to rush to their own defense...
Verging on Hysteria. The essays' editors charge that the reformers fatally gear their standards to "the unlucky, the ungifted, the indolent or the otherwise lame." This shrill voice is echoed in every essay. Tory M.P. Angus Maud writes: "We must reject the chimera of equality and proclaim the ideal of quality." Novelist Kingsley Amis encapsulates mass education with the slogan, "more means worse," and blames student unrest at universities on the presence of the academically unfit. Psychologist Sir Cyril Burt offers statistics purporting to prove that skills in reading, spelling and arithmetic have dropped in the past 55 years...
Their new militancy makes other citizens edgy, and it can be shrill. Hurling rocks and bottles and wielding a parking meter that had been wrenched out of the sidewalk, homosexuals rioted last summer in New York's Greenwich Village after police closed one of the city's 50 all-gay bars and clubs on an alleged liquor-law violation. Pressure from militant self-styled "homophiles" has forced political candidates' views about homosexuality into recent election campaigns in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Homosexuals have picketed businesses, the White House and the Pentagon, demanding an end to job discrimination...