Word: tribe
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...rights advocates are increasingly looking to the Democratic-controlled Congress for legislative remedies. Indeed, many of the Justices' rulings involve interpretations of federal statutes that could be easily overturned by passing new laws. "Hopefully, Congress will have the political will to do exactly that," says Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe. "The ball is back in Congress's court...
...diet of hamburger. He considers it bad form to criticize one society when, with very little effort, two can be skewered: "The same polite behavior that makes you a welcome guest in the drawing rooms of Kensington is equally appropriate among the Mud People of the fierce Orokaiva tribe of Papua New Guinea -- if you have a gun." Closer to home, he examines every appalling aspect of modern life. Under the heading of "Rebuffs," he notes that "at one time the 'cut direct' was delivered by looking right at a person and not acknowledging his acquaintance or even his existence...
...forget generous gratuities. Money is constantly on the minds of the porters, who see each climb as a test of how large a tip they can extract from their clients ("Bwana, give me your boots when we finish our safari"). These young members of the Wachagga tribe, who spend much of the year working on coffee plantations, saunter upward, balancing 30-lb. sacks of climbers' gear on their heads. Some haul large green wooden boxes of provisions, water jugs -- and even live chickens...
Social standing is always relative. To the hardscrabble peasants down in the Irish village of Ballybeg, the clan in the big house on the hill is the nobility. But at Ballybeg Hall the members of that gilded tribe are keenly aware of a wider world and their piddling place in it. They glamourize the past: a tatty cushion or tarnished candlestick becomes an heirloom by reason of a (probably fictitious) anecdotal link to some bygone celebrity. They embroider the dismal present. They deny the looming future of dissolution and dispersal...
...members of the tribe are no wide-eyed flower children. Their cutting wit reveals them to be the original ironic generation--unlike their 1980s counterparts, their irony is not a hip pose but a weapon of self-defense. The tribe is no group of saints--its members can be as sexist, cowardly and mean-spirited as the elders they condemn--which makes them that much more human and their quest for values that much more necessary...