Word: pablum
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...bounds into the studio with a flurry of high-fives for his raucous fans. Once the show is under way, he paces the stage hungrily, a cigarette dangling from his knuckles and venom dripping from his toothy grin. Liberals are "Pablum pukers"; the current presidential candidates are "baboons." Guests or audience members who rile him are fair game for ripostes like "Don't be a smartass with me, punk," or an escort out the door. He ignites the crowd -- mostly young males who appear to be bused in from the stands of some local sports arena -- into bursts of cheering...
...after 160 intervening pages of pablum, Vigeland offers a wonderful description of hijinks at the Harvard Management Company, the University's downtown moneymen, and their star, $240,000-a-year trader Bing Sung. Vigeland humorously captures the irony of stock- and bond-traders shouting at each other, manning three telephones at once, pioneering new kinds of financial deals--all for the benefit of the world's stodgiest university...
...inarticulate outrage for the smooth sounds of cabaret Jazz at the same time that Boy George--the painted mockery of preening masculinity--snared the attention of transatlantic audiences. The dire warnings about the System co-opting integrity bands like the Clash was only rock-press pablum. Even if Joe Strummer had held on to his elitist-bashing ethics in the face of record label take-over attempts of the sort T. Boone Pickens would admire, the great unwashed masses of record buyers would have written out his doom. Fashion sells, quality endures--but a band has to sell to quality...
Palmer's addiction has one redeeming feature; she knows the novels so well that she wins a trip for two to romantic Paris, paid by the publishers of her favorite pablum, and, by a piece of mysterious movie luck, her ever-vigilant husband cannot chaperone...
...trick of the worst kind, a bombshell that has no effect on the characters. We could forgive Tremblay these histrionics if he made the moment of our discovery a fulcrum, and swung the family into revealing psychological or moral perceptions. But his probing of Serge's childhood is just pablum from the Freudian stockpot. "We brought you up like a little girl," Lucienne tells Serge, and then berates him for not being gay and thereby escaping the family. It is supposed to be heroic when Serge stands by Nicole, declaring. "It's love, and it's real," but his defiance...