Word: loser
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Despite the rash of Asian leaders forming links with Peking, a strong case can be made that the biggest loser of the Viet Nam War was Communist China and not, as it may at first have appeared, the U.S. One admittedly prejudiced senior China watcher in Washington puts it thus: "The removal of the relatively benign American presence from the southern flank of China has caused Peking a lot of worry. Hanoi's relations with China are uneasy. Soviet access to Southeast Asia-possibly a naval base at Cam Ranh Bay [site of the largest U.S. military installation during...
...PROBABLY started laughing at the loser in grade school gym class--you know, the kid who could never do a somersault without slipping on his shoelaces on the uptake. He had banana peel appeal. By the time he hit high school he'd mastered the art of the somersault and maybe even a cartwheel but when it came to girls he'd usually slip off his social shoelaces just often enough to give the cool kids a yuk or two. Well, losers grow up and when they start making their first twenty or thirty thousand, people stop laughing at them...
Actually, Woddy Allen's formula is more sophisticated than just that. He generally takes some basic slapstick and Marx Brothers stuff, slathers it with the savoir-faire of the horny ethnic loser, and hurls the whole concoction into an unlikely context, usually the heroic fantasy world of the shlemeil. What he does is magnify the possibilities of the social banana peel. A Jewish herd blowing a date in the Bronx is one thing, but a Jewish herd posing as a Cuban dictator in bed with a sultry revolutionary who tells him he looks a lot like a Jewish herd...
Allen isn't really the loser here; you're not laughing at his embarrassment. He didn't just swallow half a bottle of cologne to impress his date. The loser is philosophy--Allen caught the big Why with its pants down. It's this switch-around, from laughing at the man to laughing at the phenomenon that elevates Allen's humor to absurdist satire...
...like being called to do a piece for the Atlantic. I like being interviewed by TIME. I like making money. I have returned from television to discover I have a magnified reputation that does get in the way. But I am not a failure. I am not a loser...