Word: cabal
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Visiting a Body Shop is like walking into the headquarters of a political cabal -- albeit one scented with dewberry perfume. There are slogans and messages scattered among the fruit-scented soaps and peppermint foot lotions. Exhortations to save the whales and fight for human rights shout from store windows, countertops and recycled shopping bags. Even Body Shop trucks are employed as rolling billboards for pithy slogans. Roddick's current favorite, taken from the side of one of her company's lorries: IF YOU THINK YOU'RE TOO SMALL TO HAVE AN IMPACT, TRY GOING TO BED WITH A MOSQUITO...
...years is Anne Rice's portrayal of vampires -- actually gray-suited Pat Buchanan-type homophobes who wouldn't risk a Paisley tie, most of them -- as mincing exquisites. Boldly and impudently, she has caricatured the gaudy world of high-camp New Orleans homosexuals (so the reader guesses) as a cabal of tormented blood drinkers. The mannered dress and behavior, the private recognitions and ironies, the tireless naughtiness, the forbidden seductions and ultimate sterility (vampires cannot breed, Rice assures us) are carried over unchanged to the vampire world. So is a pervasive and undisguised homoeroticism...
Later, the Pope met with and expressed support for a group of conservative bishops from Haiti--a cabal appointed by the church and long implicated in the suffering of the Haitian people...
...This cabal is crashed by the narrator, Richard Papen, a penniless transfer student who had taken some Greek. He is as close as the book comes to an objective center, but the device gets shaky because Richard is a facile, silly liar, boasting about an imaginary family oil well. He will do anything to be accepted by these sophisticates. Anything...
...electoral experience but rich in patriotic fervor -- to try to bankroll his way into the White House as a high- minded alternative to an unpopular President and the usual band of two- faced out-of-power politicians. In the Frank Capra classic, Tracy falls under the thumb of a cabal of back-room bosses before reclaiming his virtue in a dramatic radio address, in which he confesses, "I sold out my ideals to a gang of corrupt politicians...