Word: socialism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Another commodity has increased in social value even faster than money, and that is fame. Those blessed with a lot of one or the other want a more balanced portfolio. So celebrities cash in some of their fame for money by doing commercials, and rich folks cash in some of their money for fame the same...
...deliciously succinct expression of fictive bloody-mindedness. Through the medium of prints, the range of things that could be depicted widened to take in all Japan. Katsushika Hokusai's Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji and Ando Hiroshige's Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido are both travelogues and social listings, in which every sort of occupation, from pit sawing to innkeeping, gets its allotted description. This scrutiny of lower-class life would never have held so much interest to an earlier Japan. Manga, images of common life, are the direct ancestors of the modern Japanese comic strip...
...superfine objects, in which ordinary things like writing boxes or game boards were raised to the condition of art by means of exquisite decoration, was underwritten by the Japanese convention of giving gifts--as tribute, tokens of loyalty, signs of gratitude. The gift was a much more important social symbol in Japan than in the West, and the circulation of luxury objects fostered a level of design and craftsmanship that was, by modern Western standards, almost unimaginably high...
...about moving this character from the place where he usually lurks in the movies--on the comic-relief fringe of a teen-age gang--to the center of the action. You also have to admire the creepy arrogance of Schwartzman's performance. We can see that it covers loneliness, social ineptitude, even a certain amount of duplicity. His father is not the neurosurgeon he claims he is, but a barber. Yet the actor never once sues us for sympathy, and it comes as a nice surprise when we find it flowing toward him anyway...
Where is justice? The answer, one that Americans instinctively resist, is that there is no justice. The international arena is a Hobbesian state of nature, a world of ad hoc rulemaking where anarchy is tempered only by the rule of the bully. It must be so. In any social system--whether of individuals or nation-states--where there is no enforcer, there can be no real...