Word: mastering
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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During his four years as White House deputy chief of staff, Michael Deaver was the protector and projector of Ronald's and Nancy Reagan's public images. He was the "Vicar of Visuals," master of the carefully managed photo opportunities that became a hallmark of the Reagan Administration. Yet again and again in this intendedly affectionate memoir, he offers up intimate snapshots that undercut his previous handiwork...
Words flutter in his air like seabirds. Tern. There's a word. A noun. The Captain adores all nouns, proper and improper. A proper noun is a metaphor, observes the Captain, feeling very much the master of his bark. Bark! Noun- verb. Verbs are the best. Bray. Loop. Whir. In his captain's chair, the Captain sits every morning, pen in hand, happy as a clam, happier than any fisherman casting for trout. Trout! Is this the life? Captain Midlife asks unrhetorically, gazing about him with an astonishingly stupid grin...
McCoy, as he reminds himself over and over, is The Master of the Universe. The top bond trader for a prestigious Wall Street firm, Sherman McCoy wears his invincibility in the form of cashmere overcoats and tailored suits. His Park Avenue apartment, and even his social-climbing wife, are all marks of his Master status...
...dominate at will is to be a Master of the Universe, according to Wolfe the pharse-maker. Masters of the Universe are the ultimate egotists, absorbed in the pursuit of a power that supercedes dollar values. In a way that differentiates him from his old-line WASP father, McCoy is a patrician with an all-consuming greed. Not merely to be rich, but to be the richest. The most. For as McCoy knows, it's not the money, but the control that he seeks on the trading floor, in his 20-room apartment, in the pied-a-terre...
...waiting in front of the precinct house to tear McCoy apart as he is arrested. The circus arrest is followed by the drama of a holding tank, complete with sinister Bronx criminal types, rats and other indignities to Sherman McCoy's person. By the time McCoy is arraigned, the Master of the Universe has become the scum of the earth...