Word: vulgarizer
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...vacant chair, the post was given to another man. Crushed, Eliot went to Europe, where he was deeply impressed by the German university system. America, he wrote, must develop "a system of education based chiefly upon the pure and applied sciences, the living European languages, and mathematics . . . The vulgar argument that the study of the classics is necessary to make a gentleman is beneath contempt...
Another problem is that Bullpen is a bit too authentic, and therefore is either a bit offensive or contains too much "shop talk." The language is really too vulgar and the crotch clutching too excessive. The inside baseball jokes often fly over or under the audiences' heads. Still the jokes are not so provincial that only Red Sox die-hards can be heard laughing. The fact that the play is about the Boston club bears little significance in the story...
...cares about the Statue of Liberty? By modern high-rise standards, it is dinky, a dozen stories from head to toe. And by the standards of statuary, Lady Liberty is absurdly huge, unnecessarily literal, a giant trinket as vulgar as a sign on the Las Vegas strip. It is hardly an ancient monument. Except for Richard Morris Hunt's pedestal, the thing was not even Made in America. (Perfect protectionist irony: an imported patriotic icon...
Critic Greil Marcus finds himself defending even dumb pop. "If a Swedish director wanted to make a Rambo," says Marcus, "it wouldn't be very convincing. Only Americans are arrogant, vulgar and moronic enough to make a fantasy like that credible. But I'll put our vulgar moronism versus their refined elitism any day. I'm not saying Chuck Berry is better than Flaubert. But I also don't want to live in a world where there's only one or the other...
Those refined elitists, the Europeans, happen to like our vulgar moronism. One recent week in Britain, five of the top ten singles were by black Americans. Last year two-fifths of French movie box-office receipts went to U.S. films. A catalog detailing such worldwide U.S. hegemony is a source of pride and some embarrassment. Most of the 47 radio stations in Lima, Peru, play mainly American pop music. In Nairobi last week, ten of the 16 movies playing were American, and in a record store at the Sarit Centre shopping mall, a poster of Joe Piscopo, of all people...