Word: virtuousness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...answer is not as pat as it might seem. Though most Americans still accept efficiency as virtuous, there is a growing counter-cult that views efficiency as a dehumanizing, soul-devouring force. The cult began long ago, with Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. In their nightmare Utopias, Brave New World and 1984, they depicted future dictatorships made all the more oppressive by relentless efficiency. The counter-cult has strong expression in modern science fiction. Example: in This Perfect Day, Ira Levin, author of Rosemary's Baby, describes a futuristic society ruled by a gigantic computer, Uni, which calculates the most...
Dressed in tri-corner hat, colonial waistcoat, knee knickers, and silk stockings, Curtis expounded on the horrors of the British armed occupation : "our beauteous virgins exposed to all the insolence of unbridled passion. and our virtuous wives falling a sacrifice to worse than brutal violence...
Luck and Tendencies. Such a passage could be interpreted as an apologia for the Silent Generation's chill neutralities. But George Orwell-another Third Journalist-would have understood that her commitment is a virtuous aversion to political language "designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." Like Orwell, Adler refuses the facile role of advocate or judge. In the trial of history she is simply a friend of the court. Luck and journalistic instinct informed her of tendencies just before they became movements. She was with Martin Luther...
...time. For the weak, temptation is ever at hand; for the brave, violence waits patiently in ambush. Beyond private sin, however, those who misuse public trust do a special evil. West Virginia and New Jersey seem to justify the theory of democracy that argues not that the people are virtuous enough to rule themselves, but rather that no man is ever virtuous enough to be allowed for long to rule others...
...turning back toward easy-rhythmed blues, folk songs, and the twangy, lonely lamentations known as country music. Country rock is also a symptom of a general cultural reaction to the most unsettling decade the U.S. has yet endured. The yen to escape the corrupt present by returning to the virtuous past ?real or imagined?has haunted Americans, never more' so than today. A nostalgic country twang resounds all up and down the pop charts. Glen Campbell and Johnny Cash, two singers once chained to the old country circuit, are now national figures with coast-to-coast network shows. Commercialized...