Word: trivial
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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American Jews' sentiments toward Israel are subjected to the same unusual scrutiny. I call it unusual not because I believe citizens' loyalty and countries' moral character are trivial matters, but because no other group is the object of such concern...
Advice columns hide behind a shroud of mundanity. Both Dear Abby's small size relative to hard-news articles and its usual oscillation between the trivial and the melodramatic disguises the column's deeper philosophical significance. Every installment is more than a mere detailing of a few individuals' kvetches about an uncaring world; rather, each day's column forms a single vignette within the sweep of a surreal, Gogolesque epic about human weakness. And so the decades-long history of Dear Abby becomes a never-ending morality play...
...that character is a trivial concern. Rather, the question is whether, given the sound-bite nature of modern politics, the American people are capable of assessing that complex and contradictory thing known as a person's character, and whether the criteria they use are valid...
Mick Jagger is back after a long absence from the film world. The man who remains at the very heart of rock legend has never become any more than a trivial celluloid figure, shooting with increasing rapidity toward the margins and fringes of the film universe's great trash heap. The pile is already overflowing. Masterpieces featuring Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder (together) lie there and fester. And they're joined by the works of Christopher Reeve, Sophia Copola, whoever played Enzo the Baker (favorite line: "Hello, I'm Enzo the Baker, don't you remember me?), Mark Hamill...
...American right has had a complete, almost unopposed success in labeling as left-wing ordinary agendas and desires that, in a saner polity, would be seen as ideologically neutral, an extension of rights implied in the Constitution. American feminism has a large repressive fringe, self- caricaturing and often abysmally trivial, like the academic thought police who recently managed to get a reproduction of Goya's Naked Maja removed from a classroom at Pennsylvania State University; it has its loonies who regard all sex with men, even with consent, as a politicized form of rape. But does this...