Word: complaintant
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...does seem like a fusty foreign concept. But in a slightly different guise it dominates not only American politics but much of American society as well. That guise is the cult of victimization, about which much has been written (such as Time critic Robert Hughes' wonderful book Culture of Complaint). By now the game is to accuse others of playing the victim card, and then to trump them. Blacks and women having had their turn, it is apparently the moment for white males to enjoy semiofficial permission to feel sorry for themselves-and to demand redress. This is a class...
...article, however, did not describe the condition of his bathroom's pipes. His complaint reminds me of the parents of a friend of mine, who refused to send her to an expensive private college but bought a $20,000 car during her freshman year at a state school...
...Halpin certainly is justified in his complaint that his taxes are high--$7,500 is a lot to pay, even though he knows his high-school age daughter will benefit from that money. And anyone would be angry if he were paying to support salaries $24,000 higher than those in a city just hours away...
...complaint, even in a society that shuns direct attack, is finding echoes in high places. Yokohama Mayor Hidenobu Takahide, a former construction-ministry official, says baldly, ``The problem is that the government did not exert leadership.'' In a speech to the Diet, Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama pledged that his government would ``waste no time in taking every necessary fiscal and financial measure'' to help rebuild the devastated area. But when he suggested that the relief effort had faltered because of the quake's unprecedented severity, loud jeers rang out from the opposition benches. It was widely reported that Murayama...
...arguments have been misleading as well. The charge of elitism, for example, is exaggerated. A 1994 Nielsen study revealed that 56.5% of PBS-viewing households have incomes below $40,000, not much less than the national average of 59.9%. "Elitism" is really a code word for a more virulent complaint made by conservative critics: that PBS programming has a liberal bias. It is bad enough, say right-wingers, that Bill Moyers and Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City have to be on television; but why do taxpayers have to support them...