Word: totem
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...children on The Cosby Show is unthinkable and exciting to young Singaporeans, for instance. Fatalism about entrenched social arrangements is challenged by pop's anything-goes quality. In Africa and Latin America, black American pop stars bring with them an implicit hopefulness; Thriller is thrilling partly as a totem of black achievement. Hollywood does not promote revolution but rather a flashy kind of Yankee individualism--spontaneous, self-reliant and acquisitive. "American film exports the American dream," says Charlton Heston, "which is achievable, not a fantasy. What film has done to the developing world is to change its sense of possibility...
Screenwriters may be low on Tinseltown's totem pole, but they have one obvious advantage over more glamorous folk, like stars and directors: they get paid whether their movies are made or not. Paramount's vice president of production, David Madden, estimates that 900 to 1,000 assigned-scriptwriters are in the "or not" category, turning out scripts that are shown around town, perhaps optioned, then stuffed back into the desk drawer...
...also the first female dean of the GSAS and the first female Master of a River House, and she has become second only to Graduate School of Education Dean Patricia Graham on Harvard's female administrative For totem pole...
...memorial has become a totem, so much so that its tiniest imperfections make news. Last fall somebody noticed a few minute cracks at the seams between several of the granite panels. The cause of the hairlines is still unknown, and the builders are a little worried...
...Hart roweled Mondale from end to end of the country, leaving the Democratic candidate wounded and bleeding. On the Republican side, surfacing later, were half a dozen baby boomers who wrote the Republican platform to their wishes and who regarded Reagan, as one of them said, "more as a totem than a leader. We're trying to elect a man ten years past his prime...