Word: rigidity
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Self-Gratification. Fairlie, a British journalist who has lived for the past ten years in the U.S., can be severe and very rigid about America as a "spoiled child." Despite that tone, he is basically a classic liberal, worried about elitism and the decline of equal education and opportunity. His New World symphonette is delivered in elegant cadences. "The future of the world lies with America," Fairlie believes, and "it would be a tragedy if, in the rage that must be endured, America wearied of its own idea." Much of Fairlie's book is a rich and occasionally cranky...
Conservative economists consider the economy too complex to ensure jobs for all workers without rigid wage and price controls. Unless the economy nosedives unexpectedly, the Humphrey-Hawkins bill seems unlikely to be enacted-and the rising economic trend remains Gerald Ford's best argument as he seeks to retain the presidency...
Bell is skeptical about his fellow citizens, who, he feels, are ensnared by modernism. The once open American society is growing more rigid and confining. With few values and convictions to restrain them, people increasingly elbow one another aside as they push their rights and privileges to an extreme. Conveying an almost physical repugnance at this gathering chaos, Bell warns of the "megalomania of self-infinitization...
...extensions of genetic determinance, all of Wilson's afterthoughts about political neutrality won't change minds. Late apologetics will not serve as a barrier to political misuse of his hypothesis. Like it or not, the new synthesis may be the twentieth century's excuse for radical laissez faire and rigid status...
Surrounding the hero and heroine, however, is a world full of characters more willing than they to bow to the rigid dictates of regency fashion. Elderly female relatives are constantly shocked at the heroine's outspokenness, and make liberal use of handkerchiefs, tears, and smelling salts. Vapid young men simper about in absurd clothes, worrying only about the make of their Hessians and the height of their collars. Brainless beauties fall desperately in love with ineligible fortune hunters and threaten to elope across the border to Scotland in the face of their family's disapproval. These other, less competent characters...