Word: paranoias
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Mapped here under the big bold sky is America's Geography of Conspiracy. If Disney were to create a theme park celebrating American paranoia (Suspicionland U.S.A.), it might want to base the design on central Nevada. Tumbleweed stretches of empty highway roller-coaster over mountain ranges and down into salt flats, past ghost towns, federal prisons and legal brothels surrounded by barbed wire. In the sky, fighter-bombers execute mock dogfights and shoot laser-guided munitions at dummy air bases built from bales of hay. Gold mines--some old and haunted, some new and bustling--dominate corroded mountainsides...
...known, is either pretty sensational stuff or yet another of the ingenious tales those of us who mistrust mainstream institutions tell ourselves to help make sense of a scary, sometimes depressing world. In this case, it is a tale that combines deeply American strains of spirituality and paranoia as well as--let us be frank--a large scoop of native wackiness. One could even say, if one were inclined to put yet another spin on the following cliche, that we have met the aliens and they are us. In fact, to judge from the way they are most often depicted...
...blacks believe the worst about government actions because they're paranoid. Obviously, the popularity of conspiracy theories in black America is a valid subject for journalistic inquiry; obviously, blacks have no monopoly on wacky ideas. (Remember those militia groups fantasizing about black helicopters?) But to many blacks, pushing the paranoia angle looked like a plot to write off their suspicions as delusions...
SENTENCED. JOHN DU PONT, 58, deranged chemical heir who killed an Olympic wrestler last year in a fit of paranoia; to 13 to 30 years in state custody, to be spent in prison or a mental hospital; in Media...
...split in American taste revealed itself with the first impact of Modernist art--Cubist, Fauvist, Dada--at the scandalous Armory Show in New York in 1913. Conservatives decried Modernism as un-American, an imported madness, and connected it to the paranoia many Americans felt at the rapid change of their society under the pressure of immigration--"Ellis Island art." But early American Modernists were concerned, sometimes obsessed, with rendering peculiarly American experience. Charles Demuth (1883-1935) was fascinated by the blaring contrasts of signs and numbers on the new urban surface; John Marin (1870-1953) believed that "you cannot create...