Word: pitchfork
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Gorbachev has been in power for four years. In some ways, he was running for a second term in last Sunday's election of a new Congress of People's Deputies, seeking a mandate for his three-pronged pitchfork of perestroika (economic restructuring), glasnost (openness) and demokratizatsiya (democratization). Not since the Bolsheviks were trounced in the Constituent Assembly races of November 1917 had citizens of the Soviet Union been given the chance to vote in a real national election. This time some highly visible keepers of the Bolshevik faith fared poorly. But for Gorbachev the results could...
...Nary a "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman, of South Carolina, or a silver-throated Robert LaFollette, of Wisconsin, or a Hubert Humphrey, from Minnesota, all men who could take a national issue down to Main Street and rekindle political hope and energy among the discouraged and dismayed. Are those $200 billion deficits not a scourge? Isn't the trade deficit a demon? Aren't corporate mergers a scandal? Don't those nuclear arsenals mock common sense...
Farrakhan is a demagogue, though not much of one. Compared with North Carolina's Senator Bob Reynolds, who in 1939 likened the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia to the American pioneer spirit, Farrakhan is rational. Compared with the old antiblack, anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish demagogues of the South, like "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman of South Carolina, who boasted to the Senate, "We shot the Negroes" and "we are not ashamed of it," Farrakhan is harmless, at least for the present. He uses the basic demagogue's tools of swinging illogically from one emotional touchstone to another, of performing little body shivers that...
...prints and paintings opened last week at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, suffered both. There was a time when millions of Americans who would never have looked inside a museum knew, from reproduction, one painting of Wood's, American Gothic: he with the pitchfork and faded bibbed overalls, she of the dowdy mien and disapproving eye, in front of that white frame house. For the mass audience it was the most famous painting in the world. The runner-up was Leonardo's Last Supper; and after that, what? The Mona Lisa? The Washington...
...between its models, Wood's sister Nan and a Cedar Rapids dentist named McKeeby. The subject of American Gothic is in fact a small-town Midwesterner and his unmarried daughter, and once this is seen, the details of the painting fall into shape, as Wood meant them: the pitchfork becomes a scepter of paternal authority, a weapon for fending off suitors and perpetuating spinsterhood; its shape is echoed in the limp seams of the man's overalls, foreshadowing his own masculine debility; and so forth...