Word: banally
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Applied to mere sullen neurotics who attack others by withholding themselves, passive aggression is an item of banal psychological jargon. But down at its universal level, the term describes an unseen and mischievous jujitsu of history. It suggests the potent emotional antimatter that begins to glow like a dark crystal when people become disconnected from, and learn to mistrust or hate, the powers that control them (government, political process, corporation, parent, spouse...
...part of White Southerners and White America. For Jeffrey Vanke, White Southerners need offer no obligatory evidence (moral and behavioral evidence) that today's White South is worthy of a major Christian forgiveness thrust toward it by Harvard University and by African-Americans. Why? Jeffrey Vanke's reasoning is banal--namely, because the institutionalizing perpetrators of slavocracy and White supremacy are dead. So withholding Christian forgiveness is foul and unfair. For Jeffrey Vanke, it should be as readily forthcoming as the opening of the gate to the MBTA subway with the insertion of a coin in the turnstile...
...other hand, Paul's revelations didn't reveal anything probability couldn't: I'll have two children, one smart; my career will be intellectual-ish; and my libido is on an accelerating upswing. Nothing I couldn't have told you. But Paul's foresight wasn't entirely banal. He told me how to spot Murderer's Thumb--broad at the knuckle, narrow at the top. A statistically significant proportion of death row inmates have it. He also tried to justify his art by citing its genetic basis: apparently 60 percent of babies born with a simial line (when the intellect...
HOLOKITSCH. THAT IS ARTIST Art Spiegelmann's word for the banal and manipulative uses to which the Nazi Holocaust has been put in popular culture. Holokitsch reduces an egregious crime to the mechanics of cloying melodrama--dewy-eyed victims and sneering villains. Memory is debased; the uniqueness of each of 6 million lost souls is devalued...
Others are hindered by the downright banal quotations included with the artists' biographies. Certainly there is nothing wrong about their sentiments--"I am not Japanese American, but I'm not American, either"--but they only slow down the greater evocative achievements of the works themselves...