Word: banality
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...lost it. When a man soldiers on the winning side, the social contract of arms holds up; the young conscript is asked to endure all discomforts of the field, including death, but if he returns, the grateful nation (though it may soon grow indifferent) promises at least a banal ration of glory, a ceremonious welcome, the admiring opinion of his fellow citizens. Sometime between Tet and the last helicopter off the embassy roof in 1975, America threw away its social contract with the soldiers and left them to straggle back into the society as best they could...
...predicted a time when about 2 per cent of the population will constitute a "technological elite," while the remaining 98 per cent will have "no method adequate to question the experts." Rather, he said, this majority will "sink into the banal amusements that technology provides for that purpose...
...sooner had the [Camp David] treaty been signed than Begin gave up promoting the peace process. He withdrew into his pipedreams. At the same time he began to treat this peace we had struggled for as something banal, almost despicable...
...Juan learns what all Don Juans have learned: that they are searching for an ideal woman who does not, cannot exist; that they are thus doomed to a lovelessness that makes a mockery of their extraordinary exertions in the craft of love. There are easier ways to make so banal a point...
What raised the banal to art was, among other things, social commitment. Few of the realist painters were actually the children of workers, but many of them responded to an inescapable subject matter: the making of the French working class, from city coal heaver to country peasant, in the aftermath of the revolutions...