Word: socialism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Dependency on the experts seemed tenable in the more innocent era when science was viewed as a virtually infallible cornucopia of social goodies. Americans long clung to Virgil's ancient advice: "Believe an expert." Today, however, Americans are no longer willing to acquiesce gratefully in either the discoveries of science or their application. The citizen has rediscovered that the best of experts will now and then launch an unsinkable Titanic...
Then, too, much information crucial to the personal and social decisions of citizens is methodically hidden or withheld. The scientific world has always tended to hoard lore on work in progress, and the Government's customary secrecy in military matters, intelligence and foreign affairs has spread to many parts of the bureaucratic and corporate spheres. The clandestine spirit that properly cloaked the devising of atomic weapons inevitably carried over to veil the development of nuclear power for civilian purposes...
...citizenry's essential interest is not in knowledge per se but the social uses to which it is put. What is often kept from the citizen, in the form of knowledge, is social and political power. When demonstrations and controversies break out over seemingly esoteric technical questions, the underlying question, as Cornell University's Dorothy Nelkin puts it in a paper on "Science as a Source of Political Conflict," is always the same: "Who should control crucial policy choices?" Such choices, she adds, tend to stay in the hands of those who control "the context of facts...
...flatness about Stan Dragoti's direction that prevents the film from realizing all its comic potential. But the performances (including that of Arte Johnson as Renfield, the count's bug-eating assistant) are uniformly jolly, the parody of the basic Dracula formula well observed and its social commentary deliciously off the wall. The production's genially tatty air enhances its anarchical mood and encourages one to go with its goofy yet often shrewd comic flow...
...words? Perhaps. But in the eyes of their author, they are tersely accurate. According to Michele Wallace, 27, a truculently articulate, handsome, Harlem-bred writer, the battle of the sexes in the black community verges on open warfare. Today's black women, she says, have in effect committed "social and intellectual suicide" under the domination of "unintrospective and oppressive" black...