Word: pretenders
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...been less than a week and already the results of last Tuesday's elections have been spun into the sort of black and white talk show goo that lets us all pretend that voters are predictable and politics easily analyzed. To those pundits who make their living pronouncing on trends so ephemeral only the commentators can see them, the truth is clear: This year's political theme is anti-incumbency. (I know, you thought that was last year's theme, but generalizations this useful have a way of hanging around...
...Harvard, of course, we don't pretend. We wear academic misery with honor. There's something about this place--maybe the homely red brick, or first-year parties, or the aesthetics of the Leverett Towers--that turns even the most West-Coast-minded students into brooding New Englanders...
...album opens with "My Umbrella," a single which has gained substantial air-time on--you guessed it--alternative stations. The tune has the strong bass essential to alternative songs ranging from L7's "Pretend That We're Dead" to the Spin Doctors' "Two Princes," and features a catchy, somewhat inane, chorus: "Don't let your love/Fall on down on my umbrella." The guitar riffs are well executed if a tad typical, and singer Tim DeLaughter intones the lyrics with the prescribed amount of nasality. The song is entertaining, and "One Through Four" and "Blown Away" follow in the same vein...
Mansfield's comments, and the predictably venomous trash that last week spewed from the lips of arbiters of morality like Peninsulite Rob Wasinger, are less dangerous. The attacks that Mansfield and Wasinger have leveled against homosexuality are not sophisticated, and don't pretend to be efforts to make life easier for gay men and lesbians. Their comments, instead, are recycled mantras of hate and intolerance: Mansfield calls gay love "imperfect and stunted and frustrated," while Wasinger agrees and adds "vile and detestable" to the list...
Elaborating on his testimony from trial in Denver on Monday, Mansfield said, "I think gays make a mistake when they try to pretend they're just like everyone else...