Word: conceits
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...been said that in America during the fractious 1850s, before the Civil War, Walt Whitman entertained the wistful, urgent conceit that his great poem "Leaves of Grass" might save the Union. It would show Americans that despite their divisions they were one great nation. Montaigne, almost three centuries earlier, worked a variation on the theme. Rising above dogma and abstraction, he would pursue the general human truth by studying himself - and such generalized self-knowledge, the recognition of their human selves, might relieve people of their inclination to kill one another for religious reasons...
Marcus shows how the image of twenty-one-year-old musical Antichrist shows up again and again in discussions of the chief executive. He knows how plain the comparison is, and like any competent critic he stretches the conceit bravely, well past the facts' tolerance. Clinton's politics go almost unmentioned, for example, the better to focus on the president as if he were nothing more than an incarnation of a cultural icon. The Elvis perspective is, however, a stunningly illuminating way to see Clinton and understand why we have hated and loved...
Rich spreads the nostalgia and the theater-as-life metaphors too thick at times, and like many authors of his generation, he is enthralled with the conceit that the politics and culture of his time just happened to complicate themselves in synch with his life: his loss of innocence is paired with the quiz-show scandals, his home terrors with the Cuban missile crisis, his maturing and breaking away from home with Martin Luther King's assassination...
...George W. Bush likes nothing better than to hang around with members of minority groups, that Al Gore likes nothing better than to hang around with Tipper, and that everybody in the Reform Party is crazy" - and takes your questions (really hers). Very original use of "Survivor" as comic conceit...
...most common conceit about our future, of course, is that the kind of cash we will most want to use will be digital. But the paperless wallet has proved as practical as the paperless office. In late 1997, two New York City banks tried an experiment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. They spent millions installing special digital-cash-card machines in all kinds of retail sites--hairdressers, retail stores, even taxicabs. Then they distributed--for free--smart digital cards. Surely, if digital cash was this easy to use, people would stop using the green stuff. Wrong...