Word: fame
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...trigger the scent of desperation. Horn says, "They are interviewing for a job--the job of Miss America," and the pressure shows. It doesn't help that they are chaperoned and shadowed by so-called State Traveling Companions and two hostesses to a contestant. They are prisoners of the fame they seek...
...summer of 1961, however, he was more conventionally groomed. That's when he got his first taste of radical politics, springing antisegregationist Freedom Riders from Southern jails. The experience changed his life and led to a client list that could serve as an American Dissidents' Hall of Fame: Martin Luther King Jr., Lenny Bruce, Al Sharpton, flag burner Gregory Johnson, Indian activist Leonard Peltier, Attica prison rioters, Malcolm X and-decades later-Malcolm's daughter Qubilah Shabazz. Kunstler's combative defense of the Chicago Seven brought him four years' worth of contempt citations (none of it served...
Newt Gingrich was an upstart minority whip in the House of Representatives. O.J. Simpson was best known as a Hall of Fame running back. Nobody had ever heard of Forrest Gump. And the Kennedy School began its search for a new dean...
...fact is, victimhood is a very valuable status to hold these days. We seem to be more defined by what has happened or been done to us than by what we have achieved. Television talk-shows provide 15 minutes of fame to an endless parade of molestees, abusees, 12-steppers and indeed anyone else who can make us feel inadequate by virtue of having suffered more than we. As they share their pain and are applauded by the studio audience, we are bombarded with the message that victimhood = fame + recognition, and since we have also been taught that fame + recognition...
MORRIS (MICKEY) SABBATH is a 64-year-old former puppeteer with a prostate gland that belongs in the urology hall of fame. In addition, the randy creation of Philip Roth's new comic novel, Sabbath's Theater (Houghton Mifflin; 451 pages; $24.95), is an Olympic-class misanthrope, an example of homo invectus so addicted to wrath that he rejects suicide on the ground that "everything he hated was here...