Word: themes
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Stop the Music, a hardy musical hybrid of "Miss Hush" and the Pot o' Gold, is a variation on a well-worked theme. Master of Ceremonies Bert Parks telephones to people chosen at random across the U.S., asks the listener to identify the popular tune then being played. If he can do that he wins a nominal prize and qualifies for a chance at the Mystery Tune, a stumper that sounds tantalizingly familiar. The most recent: Get Out of the Wilderness, vintage 1850, with a marked similarity to The Old Gray Mare. If a listener identifies the Mystery Tune...
Truman-and his White House staff-had left their despair out West. The President was sure that his campaign strategy was now well set. Its theme: the Plain People's President Against the Privileged People's Congress. He had practiced the punch lines all the way back from California and, on audience reaction, he thought they were surefire. He denounced the "rich man's tax bill"; he bedeviled "the special-interests boys"; he warned of "special privilege against the interests of the people as a whole...
...that pulls his plow, the Mexican peon's most valued possession is his wistful little burro. Last week, the sturdy little beast that carries the nation's backland freight, causes many of its automobile accidents, adorns its literature and enriches its profanity, supplied the theme for the song leading Mexico's hit parade. It was called My Little Burro Doesn't Want to Go, and it was written by a young man named Ventura Romero who had never ridden a burro in his life...
...Every generation has a philosophy, a theme, a major premise. When my generation sat where you . . . sit today, we, as a generation, had a rather definite philosophy. This guiding principle . . . can be summed up in this phrase: 'Take care of Number One' . . . It seemed eminently sensible . . . If everyone took care of Number One, and concentrated on that-why obviously the sum total of all the Number Ones would be prosperity and happiness all around...
...Folly of the Victors. One theme dominates the first half of The Gathering Storm: the insensate folly of the victors of World War I in allowing the wicked to rearm. Churchill himself steadfastly warned the world against Hitler's progress from conquest to conquest, to crimes without equal "in scale and wickedness with any that have darkened the human record." That he was personally happy during these bitter years-painting, writing and lecturing-does not seem to lessen their pain in his memory...