Word: personae
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Frustration leads to overreaction. Patrick Cole, Australia's High Commissioner to Solomon Islands, was declared persona non grata by the government of Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare on Sept. 12. Sogavare's charge was that Cole was interfering in local politics and too frequently consulting opposition politicians. Canberra had argued strongly against a proposed inquiry into this year's riots in Honiara. Two M.P.s aligned with the government are in jail facing charges relating to the violence, which razed Chinatown. According to Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, Cole's expulsion was outrageous; he smells a rat. "The real motive...
...perky naiveté, utters one social faux pas after another. "The best time to have a baby," she says, "is when you're a black teenager." Then she makes some apologetic qualifier that gets her pretty mouth into even bigger trouble. Of course, this Sarah Silverman is a stage persona, a one-shtick pony that could grate if not for her zazz and nervy aplomb. "I don't care if you think I'm racist," her alter egotist says defiantly. "I just want you to think I'm thin...
Perhaps the mothers also grieve in different ways because of their contrasting relationships with their sons. Afeni Shakur was a black power--era radical who fell into drug addiction in the 1980s. Out of Tupac's difficult childhood, he crafted a tortured persona as a man both blessed and cursed. Throughout his career, he invoked the pride and shame he felt about his mother, making hits out of confessionals like Dear Mama and Keep Ya Head...
...agency's bureaucracy. She did such a good job at broadening the position's reach that it later became a path to power for other female Texas politcians including U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison. In 1988, half way through Richards' second term, she took that confidence and her persona to the Democratic National Convention, wowing everyone with her silver hair and stiletto tongue. Her famous poke at then Vice President George H.W. Bush - "Poor George. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth" - prompted talk of a national role someday and a gift from Bush in the form...
...Cohen's form of ambush comedy involves donning an assured and preposterously unknowing persona - the hip-hopeless Ali G., for example - then embarrassing real people by asking inane questions and making rude observations. A riff on the Michael Moore style of confrontation, it's a tactic I'm usually not crazy about, since anyone can seem a fool when he's not allowed in on the joke. As Moore once made me uneasily sympathetic to (or feel pity for) General Motors chairman Roger Smith, so Ali G. nudged me to the side of the politicians and aged authors who were...