Word: bureaucrat
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Nicely directed by video whiz Steve Barron (Billie Jean, Take on Me), the movie is a kind of SNL family reunion. More than a dozen veterans of the show play supporting roles; best is David Spade as a masterfully unctuous bureaucrat. But Coneheads is not Saturday Night satire. It is an updated Saturday Evening Post cover; it sees suburbia as a goofy Utopia. In E.T. and Edward Scissorhands (this movie's most obvious parental units), the alien beings stood in metaphorically for blacks and other minorities and had to flee home from benighted prejudice. Here, though, law-abiding citizens...
...pimps or deported by authorities. And faced with the difficulty of sorting out which women are prostitutes by choice and which are coerced, many officials shrug off the problem. "Almost all the girls who come to work in cabarets know what they are getting into," says a top Swiss bureaucrat. "We cannot reform the world's morals...
...veteran of the College administration for over 25 years, Epps is the quintessential Harvard bureaucrat. Some observers say his tidy, orderly world view doesn't always find a proper purchase on the anarchic problem of race relations. Instead, Epps stresses the need for long-standing administrative mechanisms, usually involving some sort of committee structure, to handle race issues as they arise...
...still the Wild West. But in New York City, the nation's largest St. Patrick's Day parade took place without a gay contingent, a judge having ruled that its longtime sponsors were free to exclude one. The liberal Babylon also decided not to rehire its top education bureaucrat after he had promoted a curriculum suggesting that six-year-olds with questions about homosexuality be sent to sources such as Heather Has Two Mommies. An alliance of the Christian Coalition and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York then proceeded to help opponents of the curriculum win seats on local...
Browner is not the first government bureaucrat to dance around the issue of pesticides. But the former Florida secretary of environmental regulation was expected to be a stalwart anti-Quayle when it came to ecological correctness. Instead, rather sensibly, she plans to gather everyone from activists to farmers to chemical manufacturers around the negotiating table. "We have to get out of an adversarial posture and into a dialogue," she says...