Word: spenglerians
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...history that began with the assassination of John Kennedy and proceeded through the riots and other assassinations of the 1960s, the Viet Nam War, Watergate, Nixon's resignation, the Arab oil embargo, the Iranian hostage crisis. Jimmy Carter was apparently overwhelmed by the presidency. The Club of Rome's Spenglerian predictions about the earth's shrinking resources shadowed the '70s, and Carter at last announced that there was a malaise in the land. The drift was bleak: things would get worse and worse and never get better again. Reagan's immediate predecessors were smudged by a darkness of failure...
...ultimate instance of American mixed feelings. Our popular culture? Spiffy, spectacular: Billie Holiday songs, Krazy Kat, Preston Sturges movies, Ernie Kovacs, the Four Tops, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Bob Dylan, E.T., even blue jeans, Whoppers and soda pop. But ask again, on a dull, gray, Spenglerian day, and the view is altogether different. Alarming, appalling, totally awesome. The critic Dwight Macdonald called pop culture a spreading ooze back in the 1950s, when Sylvester Stallone was still just a boy. Today America's righteous pop thug is huge, ubiquitous, swaggering from one medium into the next and the next...
Like many of his generation in Europe, Mies was proudly glum, an earnest young Spenglerian. The present cycle of civilization was tapped out, it seemed to him. Sweat and serendipity were anachronisms; the future looked to be a matter of machines and bureaucracy. "The individual is losing significance," Mies wrote in 1924. "His destiny is no longer what interests us." And yet has any individual had a greater impact on architecture, ever, than Mies...
They saw an American carrying a torch, running across America. But also, it may be, they saw an American running out of a long Spenglerian gloom: heading west for California, toward the light. Running away from recession, Americans might almost subconsciously have imagined, away from Jimmy Carter's "malaise," away from gas shortages and hostage crises and a sense of American impotence and failure and limitation and passivity, away from dishonored Presidents and a lost war. Away from what had become an American inferiority complex. Away from descendant history. Running away from the past, into the future. Or away from...
...richest, Saul Bellow's freestyle prose reads as if a Division Street Dostoyevsky were writing a book called Thus Spake the Nobel Savage. In Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970), the author's tone took a Spenglerian edge as the novel's elderly New Yorker ruminated on the decline of the West Side and, inferentially, civilization as the author knows and reveres it. Sammler had political repercussions. Bellow was accused of being aloof, insensitive and a neoconservative. He has calmly and disdainfully rejected these labels as simplistic...