Word: conceit
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...star of HBO's sublime series The Sopranos, the story of a suburban mafioso's efforts to deal with an identity crisis. The show shares the premise of the current hit film Analyze This, but unlike that comedy The Sopranos has a rich life beyond the wackiness of its conceit. For help with his troubles, Gandolfini's Tony Soprano--overburdened Mob manager, conflicted husband, beleaguered son--attends sessions with Lorraine Bracco's Dr. Melfi in scenes that betray the exhaustiveness, risibility and discomfiture of the 50-min. experience in a way that movies and television almost never achieve...
...that 65% in the polls, I feel as if I inhabit someone else's country. Liberal Democrats felt that way in 1984 after the Reagan landslide. How to get over it? Sometimes rage can be appeased by historical perspective. Maybe not this time. Instructed by Toni Morrison's conceit that Clinton is "our first black President," I compare him to Martin Luther King Jr. King plagiarized parts of his doctoral thesis and was a relentless womanizer. So far, so good. But King was one of the half dozen greatest Americans; he worked with the nation's fatal realities and died...
This is the conspiracy theorist's tempting conceit, the assumption that someone is behind all the awful events in the world. The true terror is, of course, that no one is, and we live in a world of random horror. Still, the premise is intriguing. Unfortunately, it gets spoilt by Ellis' penchant for proper nouns. For a book whose main character is so desperately au courant, the anachronisms and inaccuracies are enough to disturb. References are still made to the late Michael Hutchence, Winona Ryder still dates Dave Pirner, and the de rigeur Startac cellphone is misspelled. A deeper problem...
...privately religious but feel that religion has no place in politics--still play the "God card," as evidenced by President Clinton's well-choreographed visits to church (arm-in-arm with Hillary) whenever he finds himself in yet another crisis. So we are left with the supreme conceit. Politicians wag their fingers at those who act out of religious conviction, yet dutifully put their hands together and glance upward with all proper humility when the time is right...
Burnett did not originate this conceit. In his classic 1922 study Public Opinion, journalist Walter Lippmann maintained that pictures are "the surest way of conveying an idea. A leader or an interest that can make itself master of current symbols is master of the current situation...