Word: iconoclastic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...strength as record capital investment. Still, businessmen have a sense of foreboding. That anxiety has been intensified by the bearish warnings of one economist who was once ignored and ridiculed, but whose views have lately had an important influence on Government policy. He is Milton Friedman, the leading iconoclast of U.S. economics. "We are heading for a recession at least as sharp as that in 1960-61," he warns. "There is more than a 90% chance of that. There is a 40% chance of a really severe recession, such as occurred in 1957-58, when unemployment reached...
Rococo Invective. For a practicing iconoclast, however, Mencken chose surprisingly feeble icons of his own. As a young man, he fell for Nietzsche and his doctrinal fantasy of the Ubermensch. As misread by Mencken, Nietzsche provided license to despise the human race and delight in all things German-as epitomized by beer and Brahms. Politicians were rogues. The church was only a racket. People in general were boobs. Such were the underpinnings of Mencken's rococo invective. But when serious matters were involved, his philosophical resources were meager and his thinking often callow and jejune...
...original luster the work of art called George Bernard Shaw. It is not an easy task. For one thing, Shaw himself spent a long lifetime creating his own image. Just where the real Shaw ends and Shaw's Shaw begins is hard to discover. The great Victorian iconoclast, moreover, survives today mainly as a great Victorian icon - the last best literary ornament of the age he helped to destroy...
...Shaw the iconoclast was not exempt from the Victorian passion for theological speculation. "Mere agnosticism leads nowhere," he once wrote. "I hold as firmly as St. Thomas Aquinas that all truths, ancient or modern, are divinely inspired." Shaw believed in evolution, but was worried about the diverse effects of Darwinist thinking. He agreed, with Samuel Butler, that "by banishing purpose from natural history Darwin had banished mind from the universe." Shaw would have no part of a universe from which a first-rate mind (such as his own) was expelled...
Critics and connoisseurs will undoubtedly spend years tracing the imagery through earlier works. For the average viewer, the power and the majesty of Duchamp's last work lies suspended somewhere among its multiple metaphors and in the sage, sure wisdom imparted by an aging iconoclast that with every autumn comes the spring...