Word: trait
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Austin sound has a common trait, it is the lack, onstage, of show business antics or, in the recording studio, of slick electronic techniques. Leading musicians concertize and make records the way they drink-quickly, while everybody is looking, with few rehearsals and fewer regrets. The more natural, unlaundered, even raunchy the result, the better. As Michael Murphey puts it in his Cosmic Cowboy Souvenir album...
...public almost forces its leaders to utter. On the personal side, followers must also be more willing to accept their leaders as they are and less ready to buy the tiresome public relations conventions that require the American politician to be always one of the boys and hide every trait that might cause alarm?from intellectuality to a bad temper?behind a smiling mask...
...remain one of the enigmas of civilization. Leaders, wrote Peyre, "are indeed mystery men born in paradise or some devil's pit." In his brilliant study of Gandhi, Erik Erikson detected a "shrewdness [that] seemed to join his capacity to focus on the infinite meaning in finite things?a trait which is often associated with the attribution of sainthood." The rule that great leaders are summoned forth by great issues can be persuasively argued from, say, the Churchillian example?a brilliant, irascible aristocrat who was settling into a relatively unsuccessful old age when the war called him forth to embody...
...Roth determination not to repeat himself is becoming, in fact, his most famous and only predictable trait. The writer who went from Portnoy's Complaint to political satire (Our Gang), and thence to Kafkaesque fantasy (The Breast) is now so impatient that he cannot even wait to complete this book before trying to reconstruct himself. In My Life as a Man, he switches persona in mid-volume. The result is superb as a performance and uneven as a book (or rather, two books). It leads, finally, to some questions. Does a kind of bravura restlessness now not only characterize...
...Patricia Hearst has not only fallen victim to a tragic kidnaping but also to a phylogenetically evolved trait that Konrad Lorenz in his book On Aggression calls "militant enthusiasm." It is a behavior pattern precipitated when young people especially are abruptly exposed to the corrupt, hypocritical aspects of society and thereupon reject all the values and social traditions of that society. They then look for a cause that represents new and higher ideals into which they can wholeheartedly throw themselves. We have all experienced this phenomenon at one time in our lives, whether we acted upon...