Word: weightlessness
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...that's missing from Seinfeld is some human ballast to the frivolity. Jokes about air conditioning in Florida and bathrooms in shopping malls are fine as far as they go. But Seinfeld the character remains curiously weightless and remote. His relationship with Elaine -- once romantic, now platonic -- works only because it avoids all the tough questions. A viewer can relate to Seinfeld in all the little ways but none of the big ones. Which makes him a good once-a-week companion -- but probably not a guy you'd want to help move...
Television, which has all but taken over the American political process, turning the parties into the old technology, is the perfect medium for a battle of weightless, sensational symbolisms. Not that the images don't have real effect: a homemade video of a black motorist being beaten by police succeeded in burning down a sizable part of Los Angeles. The moral struggle between Dan Quayle and Murphy Brown seemed perfect and fascinating, as if all the weaknesses of both politics and television (the short attention span, the brainless evanescence, the disconnection) were leaking into one another...
...FACT, maybe if those of us in the print media stopped being self-satisfactorily obsessed with the notion of television as a weightless, substanceless medium, we and the people behind the cameras would begin to take their subjects more seriously...
...President, after all) or at best a Sancho Panza. In the case of Andrew Johnson following Abraham Lincoln, the fear of mediocrity was fulfilled. When Franklin Roosevelt died, a god of the era gave place, it seemed, to democracy's least common denominator, a barking, weightless little haberdasher from Independence...
...tiny cracks in $ Bush's armor. To do that, the party needs attention-getting spokesmen who can make a persuasive case against the Administration. But no leading Democrat has yet dared accept the challenge of running against Bush. The party has fielded just two contenders, who so far seem weightless: Virginia Governor Douglas Wilder and former Massachusetts Senator Paul Tsongas. When asked about their attitudes toward some Democratic candidates, 74% of those who took part in the TIME/CNN poll said they did not know enough about Tsongas to offer a judgment. For Wilder the number was only slightly better...