Word: self
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Good. You've got to understand that as a comic you have low self-esteem anyway. I don't like when things are going well. Like, you're just doing this because somebody canceled, right...
...arguments on the other side. As the Powers in the Democratic Party lie in bed, they take comfort in the fact that Gore does not seem to have assumed any of Mondale's mannerisms. Then it occurs to them that as Walter Mondale himself might acknowledge during a characteristically self-deprecating moment, he is a Minnesota Norwegian, and Minnesota Norwegians don't exactly have mannerisms. They tend to associate mannerisms with Swedes and other showy types...
...sense a strain of self-contempt these days in English satire? Not self-doubt, of course, and certainly not humility, just a weary roll of the eyes that follows a glance in the mirror? So it seems with Barnes' very funny, very sour new novel, which re-creates England as a theme park on the Isle of Wight. The park is the brainstorm of Sir Jack Pitman, an overweening press lord, and his staff members, one of whom has doubts: "How do we advertise the English...a people widely perceived...as cold, snobbish, emotionally retarded, and xenophobic? As well...
...world of the early 1950s was still a little punch-drunk from World War II, which had ended less than a decade before. Everything was changing. Great old powers were falling, virile new ones were rising, and the huge, poor mass of Asia and Africa was stirring into self-awareness. Hillary and Tenzing went to the Himalayas under the auspices of the British Empire, then recognizably in terminal decline. The expedition was the British Everest Expedition, 1953, and it was led by Colonel John Hunt, the truest of true English gentlemen. It was proper to the historical moment that...
...they approve of his personal behavior: the self-promotions ("I am the greatest!"), his affiliation with the Muslims and giving up his "slave name" for Muhammad Ali ("I don't have to be what you want me to be; I'm free to be what I want"), the poetry (his ability to compose rhymes on the run could very well qualify him as the first rapper) or the quips ("If Ali says a mosquito can pull a plow, don't ask how. Hitch him up!"). At the press conferences, the reporters were sullen. Ali would turn on them...