Word: earnest
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...gospel of our civic religion rather than out of anyone's buying the math. Alarm about imports tends to ebb and flow with the economy--less in good times, more in bad. So how, in the best times ever, did the World Trade Organization become the global bogeyman? No earnest college kid ever hitched across the country to carry a picket sign against the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the WTO's predecessor, although its function was similar. It took decades for the CIA, the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations to achieve their places...
...kind of cheap inspiration imparted by this excerpt from the weakest section of The Cure at Troy is perfect for earnest and boring lightweights like Doubletake Magazinewhich takes the same quote as its mantrabut one would really expect more substance from Gordimer, whose fiction breathes with implacable moral force...
...Clumsy was the first stage of this transition, an album that successfully drew upon a mix of artful designand precise production, and this trend reached its unfortunate apex in their latest release, Happiness Is a Not Fish That You Can Catch, a self-conscious album that substituted earnest glam-rock sheen for talented composition...
...help homily. Soul Owner, for example, encourages the consumer to "review your only true assets. You own your values, your integrity." (Not bad advice, though it comes from an exfoliating foot cream.) San Francisco's BeneFit, a specialty store that began selling by catalog four years ago, is less earnest but just as zany. The company weighs in with Glamazon, a liquid bronzer that features a bikini-clad Jane swinging on a vine and an $18 jar of "Touch Me Then Try to Leave..." cream...
...wealthy client fires Will, blithely telling him to read Albom's book and appreciate all he still has). But for the unironic masses who've kept this memento Morrie a best seller for more than 100 weeks, ABC has needlepointed an Oprah Winfrey Presents telepic that's as earnest as life is short. However worthy the book, its carpe diem aphorisms don't translate well to a film that deploys every tear-jerking stratagem short of a poke...