Word: birthright
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...narrator is the relentlessly randy Danny Smiricky -- also the hero of Skvorecky's critically praised The Engineer of Human Souls (1984) -- who habitually casts a jaundiced eye on the weird world of his birthright: a subjugated land where peasants bump elbows with intellectuals and the new dogma of communism has declared war on old Roman Catholic beliefs. Consigned in 1948 to teach the wisdom of Stalin at a vocational school in the rural Czechoslovak village of Hronov, Danny fights off a venereal disease contracted earlier and, rather unsuccessfully, the temptations of his female students. While he attends Mass with Vixi...
Make no mistake, not even the most credulous couch potato believes that, say, 16-year-old Doogie Howser, M.D., is for real. But the easy affluence that is the birthright of Doogie's family might seem representative enough, especially when on the following ABC show (The Marshall Chronicles) the TV father was dressed in a tuxedo for an evening of Manhattan night life. Despite the pseudo-lower-middle- class realism of Roseanne and Married with Children, the implicit message in much of prime time remains almost effortless economic entitlement. For while most of the nation resides in what bicoastal types...