Word: term
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...White a glutton for punishment? The mayor, his aides whisper in your ear, has led the city through the worst of times (i.e. the civil war to desegrate the city's schools) and now wants to guide his city into the 1980's. White is seeking an unprecedented fourth term in office and, if enough people stay awake to listen to his pitch again, he just may do it. No matter whose polls you believe, White is the favorite. The only question is how strong he will be going into the runoff...
...MUCH of this really matters, of course, because the election, in keeping with tradition, is basically a referendum on White and his three-term record. Corruption, the shining issue in the Watergate-on-the-Charles atmosphere of 1975, has faded away; only one candidate still supports the ides of a new watchdog unit to oversee activities in City Hall. "If integrity was the issue in 1975," says one city insider, "leadership is the issue this year." The natural issue for this election was "time for a change." But for the majority of Bostonians, King is too much of a change...
...sometimes elaborate denial. The critic Richard Oilman recently published Decadence (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). His elegant treatise argues that the term is almost impossible to define, is constantly misinterpreted and misused, and quite possibly should be deleted from the language...
...problems with the concept of decadence is that it has such a long moral shoreline, stretching from bleak and mountainously serious considerations of history to the shallow places where ideas evaporate 30 seconds after they splash. For all the range of its uses, decadence is a crude term. It houses fallacies. People think of decadence as the reason for the collapse of Rome, but the point is arguable. Rome at the height of its imperial power was as morally depraved as in its decline. Perhaps more...
...centuries after the sophisticated culture of the Hittites disappeared? Richard Gilman can be granted his central point: "that 'decadence' is an unstable word and concept whose significations and weights continually change in response to shifts in morals, social, and cultural attitudes, and even technology." But the protean term is still tempting. It seems the one word that will do to point toward something moribund in a culture, the metastasis of despair that occurs when a society loses faith in its own future, when its energy wanes and dies. It would probably be more narrowly accurate to use words...