Word: adman
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Perhaps the most insidious facet of this new orientation in student activism is its roots in a mass culture created by corporate advertising. Any self-respecting adman angling for the dollars of the twenty something set is bound to include references to nonconformity and independence in his copy. The great irony is that these ads' suggestible targets consummate their acts of resistance in moments of consumption long drained of meaningful content by their repetition and brevity...
Wilson says he identifies with suburbia, and he rhapsodizes about the warmth of his middle-class upbringing outside St. Louis. He still worships his father, who was an adman. "I think the best thing about this country," he says, "is that it has always in the best times supplied hope and opportunity and encouraged the plausible belief that by working hard you could improve life for yourself and your family...
Warm-hearted humanism is glopped all over Renaissance Man in the hopes that we won't notice that the story makes no sense. It proposes that the only job available to Bill Rago (Danny DeVito), a defrocked adman, is teaching an ill- defined lit course to a multicultural squad at an Army base. Why the commanding colonel thinks these studies are vitally necessary is not made clear. Especially since the kids turn out be quite sweet and bright and mostly doing fine in basic training. It's all really just a con on the part of the moviemakers...
...conversation, this veteran adman offered me a few words of friendly advice. "Forget Tiffany," he said. "Buy your wife her jewelry on 47th Street." He was referring to the world-famous diamond district, which is the epicenter of the wholesale jewelry trade. Now each year, on the eve of my wedding anniversary, I shop amid the tiny booths of 47th Street. I will admit that the whole experience still fills me with apprehension. Each time I contemplate a purchase, I can imagine the off-price jeweler later boasting, "You won't believe what I just sold to that bald...
...many ways, Wynn represents the new face of gambling in America, ingratiating and scrubbed, ready to join with Reagan's "Morning in America" adman to soften resistance to what once was considered a slightly sinful indulgence. Partly because of salesmen like him, gambling is spreading so quickly and quietly across the country these days, says David Johnston, the author of Temples of Chance, that "few people realize Minnesota has more casinos than Atlantic City." The business has exploded in just over a decade, with casino revenues going from $2 billion a year in 1978 to nearly $10 billion today...