Word: spenglerian
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...world. The tragedies, like A Long Day's Journey into Night, mourn the often unbridgeable chasm between intimacy and true affection. Sam Shepard, the most protean of active American playwrights, has written about revolution and land reform and organized crime and the decline of the West (in both the Spenglerian and the John Wayne senses), but his laconic truisms sound most universal when he focuses on the tightly confined agonies of blood kin. He especially comprehends their symbiotic bonding: time and again in his plays, family members reverse roles or take on each other's characteristics because the nature...
Most of us remember Carter's malaise and Kissinger's Spenglerian forebodings. We tend not to remember John Adams' lament that "democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself...
...same effect as bourbon but it won't give you headaches or upset the stomach, so it'll be used even by the kiddos. It'll earn gazillions. And boys, they are not going to deal us in on that hand." What Keillor has sketched is the West in Spenglerian decline, with cable and pay-per-view just beyond the horizon...
...1970s some respected intellectuals in the U.S. and Europe worked themselves into paroxysms of Spenglerian pessimism about the decline of the West. As recently as 1983, Jean-Francois Revel, the distinguished French journalist and philosopher, wrote a widely read book, How Democracies Perish. It began: "Democracy may, after all, turn out to have been a historical accident, a brief parenthesis that is closing before our eyes . . . It will have lasted a little over two centuries, to judge by the speed of growth of the forces bent on its destruction." Principal among those superior hostile forces was world communism...
...gloomier prophets of the American future, the long-term drop in the birthrate means that the U.S. has joined other industrialized nations in a Spenglerian decline of the West. In his forthcoming book, The Birth Dearth (Pharos Books; $16.95), Wattenberg points out that developed nations such as the U.S., Australia and the West European countries, which accounted for 22% of the world population in 1950, are being surpassed by the rapidly growing East bloc and Third World populations. The developed nations now account for just 15% of the world total, and will sink...