Word: watch
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...down one night to watch television with my family. All I wanted to do was be entertained. Very shortly into the program, somebody was jumping into bed with somebody else's wife, a scene of adultery. Of course it was normal, approved -- you know, there was no kind of condemnation or showing it as being wrong. I asked the children to change the channel. I got into another program, which we watched for five minutes or so, and the first thing I know, somebody has called somebody else an s.o.b., but they didn't use the initials. And I asked...
...seems like something out of George Orwell: television sets souped up so they can watch viewers watching them. Last week Nielsen Media Research, purveyor of the make-or-break TV ratings, announced plans to develop just such a gizmo. The "passive people meter," a computerized camera system, would sit atop sets in thousands of households, keeping an eye on every move that viewers made...
...such opuses as I Spit on Your Grave or Splatter University. The main features: graphic and erotic scenes of female mutilation, rape or murder. Slasher films are widely shown on cable TV, and video shops do a booming business in rentals, especially among eleven-to-15-year-olds. Youngsters watch three or four at a clip at all-night "gross-out" parties. In some fraternity houses on college campuses, slasher movies play continually in lounges, along with pornographic films...
...most popular hymns in the Protestant repertoire, Onward Christian Soldiers, and to strip verses from The Battle Hymn of the Republic. The literal-minded rationale: a pro-peace church should not use "militaristic imagery." Outraged parishioners would have none of it. The two hymns were restored -- banners, watch fires and all -- after the revisionists were inundated with 11,000 protest letters...
From a comparative perspective, this Australian professor could observe what many of us often miss: that the student body, like the majority of Americans, is essentially anti-intellectual in nature. It's disheartening to watch what could be America's greatest collection of raw intellectual talent descend into choosing their courses by exam date and lecture time...