Word: parvenu
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Trump Plaza Hotel & Casino is not destined to be remembered along with Yalta and Potsdam as one of history's great summits. But back in 1988, at the World Wrestling Federation's Wrestlemania IV in Atlantic City, Donald Trump met Jesse ("the Body") Ventura. The real estate parvenu was impressed by the wrestler's sense of showmanship. The two remained casual acquaintances over the years--they became pen pals and talked about golf. Eleven years later, they find themselves soulmates: each would deny Patrick J. Buchanan the Reform Party's presidential nomination. Trump is eyeing the race and has ordered...
...realm where American art gave up its spiritual reach in exchange for the bounty of commerce. Warhol, more than any of his peers, was its avatar, its passive-aggressive emperor with a tapioca complexion and a pale wig, gliding through its landscape as prankster and publicist, pariah, sexual cipher, parvenu...
...atrocity -- is still pursued, although with less candor about the pleasure involved: some tribal or nationalist rationale ("Greater Serbia!") is proclaimed. Even after the cold war has ended as big-battle war seems to have become extinct -- the Gulf War perhaps a last set piece of tank warfare -- parvenu nations tinker in their basements with homemade nukes. Even more ominous is the global inundation of handy conventional weapons, a planetary democratization of firepower trickling down to Third World villages and the hip pockets of American schoolchildren...
What trumpery. The issue is not the aesthetic merit of Tiffany jewelry but my parvenu pretensions in giving it. I was confronted with my folly a few years ago, while interviewing a marketing guru. "When you make a large purchase," he theorized, "there is a simple formula everyone follows -- risk reduction." His prime example, reading me perfectly, was the little blue Tiffany box, which he called "an expensive sign of riskless excellence...
...South Africa, where he spent his youth as an American businessman's son. The Substance of Fire pitted a father against his children for control of a New York City publishing firm. The End of the Day mocked the morality of success in tradition-bound London and parvenu Los Angeles. The new work, drawing on themes from its predecessors, depicts rootless, placeless people connected only to corporate life...