Word: prurient
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Alas, indignant--or prurient--revisionism does not work with a fine pencil. Thomas Jefferson amounted to something infinitely more important--and more interesting--than one would know from the noise and scandal obscuring his achievement...
...Cunanan was 27 in 1997 when he launched himself on a cross-country spree, killing five men, among them the designer Gianni Versace. This unleashed torrents of media coverage, much of it by trash-TV shows and their supermarket sisters. Now, as if that were not enough to sate prurient tastes, two books revisit the events. Orth, a writer for Vanity Fair, unloads her notebooks indiscriminately, providing an overdetailed, pedestrian chronicle. Cunanan, a gregarious, wickedly clever mythomaniac and petty thief, disported himself in the kinky gay netherworld of alcohol, drugs, prostitution and sadomasochism. In a jealous rage he murdered...
...independent counsel act, the law that permits Kenneth Starr to conduct dragnet investigations into private lives, taking as much time as he wants, spending as much money as he wants, inquiring into whatever excites his prurient curiosity--and all without visible accountability. Starr usurped congressional prerogatives when instead of following Leon Jaworski's Watergate precedent of submitting his findings in a neutral form and allowing the House of Representatives to make its own judgment, he shaped them into a demand for impeachment. From compliant judges he obtained rulings that turn White House lawyers, aides and even Secret Service personnel into...
...that would make us wince in mixed conversations. The rape trials of William Kennedy Smith and Mike Tyson accelerated the trend toward frank sex talk, and the rise of Viagra brought to mind graphic images--featuring Bob Dole. Granted, in the Clinton scandal, 13 months of saturation coverage and prurient detail have conspired to make this episode especially troubling. Yet its enduring legacy may simply be the adding of the term oral sex and its vernacular synonym to the list of once avoided phrases that are now used openly--the continuation of a trend that was well under...
...creaky lectern in front of a crowd of fidgeting guys wearing see-through earphones and bad ties, their heavily made-up faces hidden as they hang their heads in shame and prurient interest...