Word: jerkings
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...knee-jerk tendency at year's end is to look back and decry the 12 months at hand as the most dismal, most indicative of civilization's downward arc since, well, the 12 months before this. 1996, with enough depressing cultural offerings to warm a pessimist's heart, may not change a Scrooge's mind on this score. Perhaps 1996 will even be remembered as the year of the somewhat desperate exclamation point: That Thing You Do! Suddenly Susan! Lamar...
...common is the roar of a phantom crowd; they always speak of other people having spoken them. It's as if they come with a built-in laugh track. And keeping us on track, they provoke in us click responses, the sort of electronic-entertainment reaction we twitch and jerk to more often lately. We hear Not even close, He's history or What's wrong with this picture?, and we immediately sense the power structure of the moment. In fact, we may subconsciously applaud such speakers because they've hypertexted our little lives right into Friends, Seinfeld...
...staff's knee-jerk defense fails to offer compelling supporting arguments for its position...
...staff's knee-jerk reaction to the uncovering of severe racism at Texaco wrongly calls for the University to divest should Harvard not be able to clear the oil company of its tarnished name. In so doing, a mistaken question is posed: The issue is not whether Texaco's executives have institutionalized racism there (they have), but how Harvard can most effectively combat that racism...
...necessary to interrupt Brinkley: "You can't say that on the air, Mr. Brinkley." To which Brinkley rightly responded, "Well, I'm not on the air." He's not, anymore, and he is finally liberated to inject some reality into TV-land, which otherwise throws up as a knee-jerk reaction those democratic platitudes we have all had to tolerate since news became corporate domain. Journalism as honesty? Journalism as the relation of reality? Journalism as acerbic sarcasm? Nyet. "You can't say that on the air, Mr. Brinkley...