Word: totems
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Reserve faces a fight; opposition to the latest proposal began building up even before the official announcement. But Defense Secretary Robert McNamara has succeeded in making some beneficial cuts in the past and shows no inclination to give up, despite the militia's status as a political totem...
...geodesic dome meant to symbolize a nugget, or else pan gold themselves, sourdough-fashion, in chutes from the Chena River; sip cocktails in the "Wheelhouse," a VIP lounge on the superstructure of the old Alaskan stern-wheeler Nenana; view an aboriginal village with Eskimo kayak rides and a Tlingit totem-pole carver at work; or ogle the cancan dancers from an authentic gold-rush...
...mother; her husband (Jerome Dempsey) is an earthworm. To secure her rise to power, she coaxes him into contracting elephantiasis, which the natives regard as a symbol of regal divinity. He is a king in name and pain only, as she promptly betrays him with a kind of virility totem, a bare-torsoed American from Marlbrando country. Deserted by this lover at play's end, the white queen faces beheading by the tribe...
World as Wilderness. Muggeridge is compulsively nasty to politicians, whatever their party. "Macmillan," he wrote, "seemed in his very person to embody the national decay he supposed himself to be confuting. He exuded a flavor of mothballs." Churchill, whose writings were "gaseous and overwritten," became a "kind of totem." In his old age, he was "produced as totems are, to keep up tribal morale." As for liberalism, said Muggeridge, it is "really just a death wish. We liberals are so made that anyone who wants to murder us is a hero and anyone foolish enough to be on our side...
...third factor has fixed his position as low man on the totem pole of literary fashion. In an age of publicity, puff and promotion, John Dos Passos never developed an exploitable personality. He never became a Great White Hunter, or a symbol of doomed gilded youth, or a pornographer, or a public crackpot or private monster, or even a member of the pansy international, any of which roles might have given him an identifiable and saleable personality. He never even wrote the kind of novels in which some character would turn up again and aeain and enable the reader...