Word: solemn
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Walt Whitman called it "the Presidentiad." Woodrow Wilson referred to it as a "great and solemn referendum." The average voter, whoever he may be, looks on it as a recognition of his own importance. The cynic may think it a waste of good time and money, but the patriot leaps to the ballot box with an unholy joy shining...
...anxiousness not to be merely entertaining, Rush injects overblown and spurious material that interferes with the pure amusement of the spectacle--as if there were something so mere about good entertainment that the filmmaker has to go out of his way to drape it in places with solemn purple robes of meaning...
Wolfe's New Journalistic heritage resurfaced last year in The Right Stuff, a book he worked on for eight years. The book showed Saturation Reporting at its best but the empathy was gone; enter the solemn sneer. Wolfe spent lots of time with the astronauts, talked to them for hours, but never in The Right Stuff does he show them anywhere near the amount of respect that he displayed toward stock car racer Junior Johnson or the girls in the Women's House of Detention, both subjects of '60s Esquire articles...
...largest public demonstration in France since the 1968 strikes and the first time since the liberation of Paris in 1944 that all political parties and trade unions had united under a single banner. Filled with grief and revulsion, 150,000 people joined a solemn three-hour march through Paris to denounce racism and antiSemitism. The protest was in response to the terrorist bombing of a Paris synagogue two weeks ago. Four passers-by on the Rue Copernic were killed and nine others seriously wounded. The bomb exploded prematurely, while 600 worshipers were still in the midst of Sabbath services...
...seriousness of his quest and the importance of its ramifications. Terkel's book never strays to meaningless platitudes and unctuous rambling. The book presents people talking about their lives; and "people," given a sympathetic listener, speak sense, not solemn pontifications about "the city on the hill." The author's selection of these people is inspired. Terkel didn't look for the "correct" ethnic or social mix--this is no Miller Beer commercial with the required ratio of three whites to every Black. He wants a cross-section of opinions, not faces...