Word: doubting
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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...Shelby Steele argues, preferential treatment for blacks has an even more pernicious cost: it creates corrosive doubt in the eyes of both whites and blacks about the worth of any black achievement. However much people may deny it, no one can see a black professor or doctor without having the thought run through his mind: Did he make it on his own or did he get through on a quota? These doubts gratuitously reinforce in both blacks and whites a presumption of racial inferiority...
Politicians may debate whether America, in the post-cold war era, will continue to hold center stage. But no one can doubt that it fills the world's screens -- cinema and television -- as well as its VCRs, bookshelves, record stores and CD players. The dominance is especially pronounced on movie marquees. In most foreign countries, the most popular films are from Hollywood: brain-bashing action epics from Schwarzenegger and Stallone, to be sure, but also fantasy romances like Pretty Woman and Ghost. If we make it, they want it -- and lately, if they are Japanese, they want...
America is saturating the world with its myths, its fantasies, its tunes and dreams. At a moment of deep self-doubt at home, American entertainment products -- movies, records, books, theme parks, sports, cartoons, television shows -- are projecting an imperial self-confidence across the globe. Entertainment is America's second biggest net export (behind aerospace), bringing in a trade surplus of more than $5 billion a year. American entertainment rang up some $300 billion in sales last year, of which an estimated 20% came from abroad. By the year 2000, half of the revenues from American movies and records will...
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...
...during some of the darkest days of World War II, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill visited Franklin Roosevelt in the White House at Christmas. He helped the President light the White House tree and in a short speech noted the curious intermingling of doubt and joy enveloping the world: "Let the children have their night of fun and laughter. Let the gifts of Father Christmas delight their play. Let us grownups share to the full their unstinted pleasures before we turn again to the stern task and the formidable years that lie before...