Word: dionysian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...ancient Greeks, it was a mysterious, potent force that inspired the Dionysian rites and their artistic offspring, Attic drama. To Christians, it represents the blood of their Saviour. To the secular connoisseur, it is the most profound of liquids -- at its finest, poetry in a glass...
...great collision of the generations, the young created their own world, a "counter culture" as Historian Theodore Roszak first called it, and endowed it with the significances and pseudo-profundities of a New World. No one had ever had sex before. No one had ever had the Dionysian music, the sacramental drugs, the world struggling back to its protomagical state...
Eventually, though, the story was finished. At home, Bacchus-like, I poured myself a preprandial libation, but I was far too tired to contemplate an evening of Dionysian delights. Myths, I thought. Too many demons and deities. They are all about us. Here. There. Everywhere...
...libertarian argument: people have the right to control their own lives, even to wreck their own lives, if that is their choice. Unmentioned as a reason for legalizing drugs, though widely believed and acted on as a practical matter by most Americans, is what might be called the Dionysian argument. Look, it says, the desire for an occasional artificial escape from the human condition is part of the human condition. It is not ignoble. In fact it's healthy. Yes, yes, within limits...
...rhapsodizing about the pleasures of getting high got the kind of serious attention reserved more recently for The Fate of the Earth and The Closing of the American Mind. This is a sharp reminder of how far we've veered in the other direction, to the point where the Dionysian impulse is considered an illegitimate subject for social policy, except for the question of how far we dare to go in smothering...