Word: trivializations
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...vivid, strange electronic moral pageants, like the Thomas-Hill hearings, that are becoming a new American form. This is national theater: surreal, spontaneous, mixing off-hours pop culture with high political meanings, public behavior with private conscience, making history up with tabloids and television personalities like Oprah Winfrey. The trivial gets aggrandized, the biggest themes cheapened. America degenerates into a TV comedy -- and yet Americans end up thinking in new ways about some larger matters. The little television screen, the bright and flat and often moronic medium of these spectacles, works in strange disproportions of cause and effect: often...
Ignatiev pauses. "In some sense this is a trivial issue. Clearly I have a sense of humor over it--it's only a $40 toaster...
...fulfilled by the Okie strawberry picker who survived the Depression and bought a farm, by the New Yorker who built a chain of car washes, by the Vietnamese refugee who worked his or her way through Cal State Long Beach and became a physicist. In stressing its most trivial and least typical aspects, we miss the lessons that L.A. has to teach about how modern urban societies should -- and should not -- be organized...
Clinton's admirers put much blame for Clinton's woes on print and TV journalists who, in their view, have been harping on largely trivial questions of character while ignoring the policy issues that are Clinton's strength. Result: the voters who have heard about Gennifer Flowers vastly outnumber those who have any idea that Clinton has put forth a highly detailed program on taxes and the economy, let alone those who have any notion of what his program contains. There is some truth to this, but given public attitudes, it is largely inevitable. Political scientist James David Barber...
...truly trivial issue, revealing only because it illustrates Clinton's penchant for legalistic evasiveness. Questioned about pot smoking, Clinton first said he had never broken U.S. or state laws -- an answer clearly designed to convey the impression that he had never tried the weed, without his actually saying so. When someone finally asked the obvious question -- what about while he was abroad? -- Clinton confessed that he had smoked marijuana as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford in the late '60s but felt compelled to add that not only had he not liked it, he had not even inhaled -- an assertion that...