Word: camped
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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...account by London-based Amnesty International is crucial because it has dramatically affected the world's most important audience. Days after reading the 82-page report at Camp David, George Bush was still talking about it. "I ask you to read half of it," said the President during an interview with TIME in the Oval Office. "If you can't stomach half of it, read a quarter...
Annual "bests" and "mosts" express a human instinct for putting things in order. This year's crop also reflects a shift from a time of ostentation to one of restraint, unease and do-goodism -- plus flashes of camp and cheekiness...
...befits the onset of the century's finale, a mixture of earnestness and irony -- a kind of American yin and yang -- characterized the year. The Northwest hamlet of Twin Peaks became the moody, ironic capital of the American landscape. Madonna, the queen of camp, literally and cheekily wrapped herself in the Stars and Stripes in a larky get-out-the-vote video. Even George Bush got into the irony act when he told America that since he is President, he no longer has to eat his broccoli...
Susan Sontag, whose 1964 essay Notes on "Camp" broke new ground in interpreting American popular culture, expresses doubt that the vitality of European culture will be extinguished by America's onslaught. "The cultural infrastructure is still there," she says, noting that great bookstores , continue to proliferate in Europe. Rather than regarding Americans as cultural imperialists, she observes wryly, "many Europeans have an almost colonialist attitude toward us. We provide them with wonderful distractions, the feeling of diversion. Perhaps Europeans will eventually view us as a wonderfully advanced Third World country with a lot of rhythm -- a kind of pleasure country...
...could have imagined, in so smugly prosperous a decade, that shantytowns would become tourist attractions? Until the mayor evicted them last summer, homeless people in San Francisco drew busloads of photo-snapping foreign tourists to their refugee camp in front of city hall. There, the visitors found a second city of cardboard condos, clogged with the traffic of shopping carts through makeshift living rooms, outfitted with easy chairs and dresser drawers. The waterless fountain steamed with stale urine; a sun-scorched lawn sprouted cigarette butts...