Word: symptom
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...movie gloats over its scenes of degenerate sex and reaches a climax in human butchery. Thus pornography of sex and violence produces a third type: the pornography of exploitation. Sweet Saviour makes a mockery of a tragedy. Presented as a movie, it is actually a symptom of a social disease...
Fury at human imperfection is the first symptom of the hero's malady. As a teen-age poet, having made the banal discovery that his parents are far from perfect and that the whole world is wicked, he spews out a book of vitriolic verses advertising his family as an archetypal clan of upper-middle-class monsters. By besmirching their reputation he established his own. But his success becomes his fate. In literature he is merely a marked-down Rimbaud who curses a corrupt society as a way of joining it; in private life he is a frightened, self...
...there seems in such new novelty and head shop items an impulse to debunk childhood fantasies, or at any rate the fantasies of Disney's artists, by degrading the whole crew and thereby achieving a kind of liberation. It is Disney in the style of Jean Genet-a symptom, paradoxically, of the fetish for childhood that has seized many who are in the process of leaving...
...Each great road had the potential to become "a work of art, both as a pattern on the map, as a monument against the sky, and as a kinetic experience." Of course, the roads bred more cars, and cars bred what Banham calls "a coherent state of mind." One symptom: the emphasis on driving everywhere, a "willing acquiescence in an incredibly demanding man/machine system." Another: the customized car as a form of exuberant self-expression...
...confined to men. It can also strike females at home, in offices, in volunteer agencies, or even for Women's Lib. Afflicted housewives often overuse the phrase "Let me do it" while complaining of having to clean up after everyone else. But compulsive housework is not the only symptom of work addiction evident in the home; there is also compulsive childbearing, "one of the most exhausting types of work there is." The woman who has many children, Oates concludes, may simply be a workaholic...