Word: humanizing
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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Sociology has spawned more games than Parker Brothers. But all the divertissements rest upon a single process -the breakup of phenomena into categories. It has been so ever since Auguste Comte invented the "science" and divided human progress into three stages, theological, metaphysical and positive. In recent times, the games people played included Highbrow, Middlebrow, Lowbrow, U and non-U, Soul and no Soul. Now comes the first new pop-soc. parlor game of the '70s-Consciousness...
Reich's three categories are first presented historically as stages in a familiar pageant entitled, "How America went wrong . . . and the rebirth of human values that is emerging in the new generation." For Reich weighs the American past and finds it wanton. The Consciousness I period is associated with the young Jeffersonian Republic-freedom-loving, egalitarian, expansive, democratic, though lamentably competitive. Its spirit stifled slowly, as America evolved into another political caricature, the pinched, repressive, committee-loving, life-suppressing, reform-minded meritocracy, which Reich seems to regard as something very like Hell on Earth. Decisive moments in this decline...
...someone older, who has never experienced the joy of Charlotte's Web or Stuart Little, he is, as a friend of mine said recently, "very weird." True, spiders don't usually weave slogans such as "Some Pig" into their webs to save pigs from being slaughtered; and human parents don't usually give birth to a son who looks exactly like a mouse. But none of that matters, because they're all very real, endearing characters with real problems-of survival or identity or whatever. So when Charlotte (a spider) dies, even though her babies will be hatched...
...White's other books, the line between human and animal is very faint. Louis befriends a small boy, Sam, who takes the swan to his school in Montana to learn how to read and write. ("If I can teach a bird to write," says Mrs. Hammerbotham, first grade teacher, "it'll be big news all over the Sweet Grass country. I'll get my picture in Life magazine. I'll be famous...
First, on May 8th and 11th large numbers of pickets at University Hall, by marching in a human chain and massing on the steps, physically barred University officials from entering their offices...