Word: salesman
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...home, Dave triumphantly tagged him out: he had held onto the ball while tossing an Idaho potato carved to look like a baseball. Unamused, the umpire ruled that the run had scored. Dave's angry manager got him kicked off the team. Last week Bresnahan, now a real estate salesman, was vindicated. "Gehrig had to hit .340 and play in more than 2,000 consecutive games to get his number retired," he boasted. "All I had to do is hit less than .150 and throw a potato...
Reagan is also a preacher -- or, perhaps, a traveling salesman. He believes that the mashed-potato circuit, and now the caviar circuit, is made for hustling. He came to Moscow firm in his intent to discuss human rights rather than wrestle with the details of arms control. And discuss he did. Partly this reflected his need to burnish his hard-nosed conservative credentials back home: there was worry that he seemed more glowing in his endorsements of Gorbachev than of George Bush. But mainly it was because Reagan enjoys being a missionary and a teacher...
Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, for example, uses the prism of salesmanship to capture the petty expectations of my parents' generation. Over the years, the travelling salesman has vanished from the cultural landscape, as abruptly as a stern shut of the front door. But the image of getting by on "shoe-shine and a smile," as Miller wrote, still remains. Tom Wolfe, today's Class Day speaker, is in part responsible for updating that American classic...
Wolfe, in his new novel, tells the story of a different type of salesman, Sherman McCoy, a Yale-educated bond trader. Wolfe's incarnation still resonates with the uniquely American dilemmas of social adjustment. McCoy too wants to be well-liked, although he defines success more in terms of the quantity of party invitations he receives than the number of smiles from a housewife...
...particularly apt that a writer with such preoccupations about the individual in society is speaking to a theatre full of graduates-to-be; for each graduate soon becomes his own salesman--whether in drafting resumes or in coming off well during a job interview...