Word: pablum
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Which gets to perhaps the central fact about today's excess of gossip and celebrity journalism: it is contemptuous of readers and viewers. It says they are incapable of dealing with real news and that they must be fed Pablum and given the illusion that they are vicariously participating in important stuff. It is also about class: a nouveau celebrity class applauded less for achievement than for the mere acquisition of money or the act of becoming famous. I suspect that the pre-eminence of this type of gossip and celebrity journalism is not unrelated to the private frustrations...
...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...