Word: dumb
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...proceeds to survey America's problems and blame them on various people. If you're familiar with his formidable oeuvre of TV utterances--his book is kind of a Cliffs Notes version--you can guess the culprits. The "bureaucrats" have helped destroy the family, undermine the work ethic and dumb down education. Meanwhile, the liberal "elites" (in a "calculated effort") have helped "discredit this civilization," sapping faith in American values...
Maybe no one is the perfect person for a job that depends so much on dumb luck in guessing the public's whims. An idiot could succeed in such a position, a genius could fail, simply by picking or passing on a Star Wars or a Forrest Gump. It's also possible that Ovitz was unsuited for the position. As a talent agent, he is a seller in a seller's market; the studios want his clients and will pay hugely for them. As MCA czar, he would have been a buyer in that market. The fellow who helped jack...
Like Congress, students were reexamining thegovernment's relationship with Harvard. Studentsseriously questioned many long-standingconnections between Harvard and a government manyof them abhorred as "deaf, dumb and blind...
...when the mail bomb exploded, the bomber writes, "If you'd had any brains you would have realized that there are a lot of people out there who resent bitterly the way techno-nerds like you are changing the world and you wouldn't have been dumb enough to open an unexpected package from an unknown source...
Nauman is good at a particular sort of put-on, a sour clownishness. He makes art so dumb that you can't guess whether its dumbness is genuine or feigned. When you see his spiral neon piece The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths, you assume it's irony, the cadaver of "inspirational" American romanticism-until you reflect that maybe that's what Nauman really thought, or what the vestigial romantic in him would have liked to think, but in no case can the mere neon sign deliver on its promise, and this frustration (one assumes...