Word: dumb
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Whitney Biennial, have been full of this stuff -- by Sue Williams, Raymond Pettibon and others. Its tacky sub-pop imagery, its dazed passive-aggressive stance, its fixation on teenage weltschmerz, all entitle it to be seen as a mini-trend, linking up with the wider American cult of dumb popular therapeutics. In the 1980s, American neo-Expressionist artists shoved their excremental clods of paint at us with the self-evident pleasure that eight-year-olds take in dirty words. Patheticism is the conceptual version of this: no paint, just the words. Poo- poo, caca, and screw you, Daddy...
...beyond the budget of his blue-collar Brooklyn family, the father (Peter Friedman of TV's Brooklyn Bridge) storms out in rage at being unappreciated, his son's wad of cash gifts stuck precariously in his back pocket. He returns hours later, explaining that he has been watching the "dumb" movie Born Free. In one variation, his bored wife (two-time Tony Award winner Christine Baranski) chucks him out. In another, she commits suicide by leaping off the tacky flat's tiny balcony. In a third, their children join her in denouncing him. In the last -- the quietest, most real...
...penis envy made us look dumb, this will make us look totally gullible," says psychiatrist Paul McHugh, chairman of the psychiatry department at Johns Hopkins University. "This is the biggest story in psychiatry in a decade. It is a disaster for orthodox psychotherapists who are doing good work...
...other female employees to retrieve coins from his front pants pocket. He once suggested that Harris accompany him to the local Holiday Inn to negotiate her raise. He also regularly responded to her with remarks like "You're a woman; what do you know?" and called her "a dumb-ass woman." Said Harris: "It got to the point that I didn't have any choice but to confront him. I had had enough." When he failed to change, she quit. "I felt so hopeless," she said. "I just can't tell you how terrible it was." She also sued. Lower...
...however, NAFTA has picked up an enormous load of symbolic freight. Opponents -- most prominently labor unions and Ross Perot's movement -- see, not entirely wrongly, the U.S. economy being hurt by growing foreign competition, and view NAFTA, less logically, as the latest in a succession of what Perot calls "dumb trade agreements" that have taken a grievous toll of American jobs. Proponents regard the pact as an unavoidable necessity if the U.S. is going to compete with the trade blocs forming in Europe and Asia. Rejection, they argue, would be a futile and dangerous attempt to wall...