Word: surfeits
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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That is undoubtedly part of it. "The price of eternal vigilance," says Marshall McLuhan, "is indifference." In the same way, the cost of constant excitement, of a persistent and violent rearrangement of one's sense of order, results in surfeit. The mind is overcome by a kind of compassion fatigue. The events of the '60s have profoundly disturbed the American sense of reality. The longest war in the nation's history, with the American combat dead and wounded last week passing 300,000, seems at once horribly strange and grimly familiar. All too accustomed to daily deaths...
Hardly anyone can quarrel with the ideal of a healthy sexuality, free of false shame and guilt. Yet to judge from the nation's mood, a great number of Americans feel that the surfeit of sex must somehow be contained. Unless some restraints are imposed?or self-imposed?history suggests that the reaction to permissiveness may be strong. The ribald, rollicking Elizabethan age was succeeded by the severity of King James I and the censorious society of Oliver Cromwell. The excesses of the Restoration were sobered by Victorian propriety. The licentiousness of Weimar Germany ended in the austere and brutal...
...political rallies. Last week they ran a $2,790 newspaper ad in New York showing six young men standing before a building with clubs in hand. In an age of Black Panthers, white vigilantes, and apparently millions of armed and angry individuals, there would already seem to be a surfeit of quasi-military partisans. Threat, however, tends to breed counterthreat. Out of the people traditionally identified with the word ghetto has come an unusual group called the Jewish Defense League-whose members posed before a synagogue for last week's ad and called themselves "nice Jewish boys...
Problem Mountain. The problems of plenty are manifold in the Common Market countries. A policy combining protection and unrealistic price supports without production quotas has yielded a surfeit of foodstuffs. Excess sugar stocks have swollen to 1,000,000 tons and are expected to grow by more than 300,000 tons annually. In Italy, landowners have been forced to destroy crops of fruit and vegetables, and officials at the Ministry of Agriculture are fretting over what to do with 150,000 tons of ripening surplus oranges, more than 10% of the annual harvest...
...Bonus. The surfeit of shortages is reflected in the rising fees charged by employment agencies and training schools. Some agencies collect as much as $2,400 to fill a $15,000 job. Rather than pay such bounties, Loral Corp., a Scarsdale, N.Y., electronics firm, offers a color television set to any employee recommending an engineer who remains with the company for at least three months. Marcor, Inc., formed by the merger of Montgomery Ward and Container Corp. of America, awards $100 merchandise credits to employees who help recruit new data processors and secretaries...