Used to be, conservatives revered the Average American, that Norman Rockwell oil painting of diner food, humble faith, honest toil, and Capraesque virtue.
Who elected Larry King America’s grief counselor? We, the viewing public, did, by driving up his ratings whenever somebody famous passes.
What stars do in their off-hours is a never-ending source of diddling curiosity to the tabloid sensibility.
People want to be special. I think ambition can take in a whole package of things, power or sexual excitement.
A lost election can have the jolt of a drop through the gallows door, leading to a dark night of the soul in which the future presses down like a cloud that will never lift.
My high-school papers, my college-application essays, read like Norman Mailer packed in a crunchy-peanut-butter sandwich.
I understand that one of the purposes of bipartisanship is to cram something difficult and necessary down the American people’s gullets for which neither party has the fortitude to assume full responsibility. It’s a way of turning a possible gangplank into a teeter-totter.
High expectations weren’t nurtured in my neck of nowhere back then – children weren’t fawned over from an early age as ‘gifted’ and groomed for a prizewinning future; self-esteem was considered something you had to pick from the garden yourself.
Telling writers to shut up is a sure way to keep them talking.
In 2008, Barack Obama did get Democrats hyperventilating, whipped up to a creamy froth, while John McCain creaked ahead like a cranky granddad whom Republicans let move to the front of the buffet line, deferring to seniority, as they had in 1996, when Bob Dole turtled to the top of the ticket.
Republicans: steely, rational, paternalistic, respectful of authority, easy to herd, the party of No. Democrats: sugary, emotional, idealistic, yearning for novelty, hard to marshal, the party of Oh Yeah, Baby, Make Mama Feel Good.
After a decade this glum, we deserved a shot of ‘Glee,’ a show that restored our faith in the power of song, the beauty of dance, and the magic of ‘spirit fingers’ to chase our cares and woes into somebody else’s backyard.
And what could be a hotter ticket than the improbable triumph of ‘The Book of Mormon,’ the musical-comedy moon shot of the season? Its creators, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, of Comedy Central’s ‘South Park,’ are the most unlikely Rodgers and Hammerstein team ever to bowl a thundering strike.
With Barack Obama as president and the super-happening Michelle Obama as First Lady, you would think a new tone, a new tune, a kicky new jazzitude, would have entered Washington discourse, but it remains a landlocked island unto itself, held captive by its tribal fevers.
A typical ‘Larry King Live’ is a pastiche whose absurdism defies parody. Wearing his trademark suspenders and purple shirts, he looks as if he’s strapped to the chair with vertical seat belts, unable to eject.
It isn’t that NPR is matriarchal but that it has dedicated itself to not being patriarchal in its outlook and presentation, stipulating from the outset that its headline voices would not resound across the fruited plains from big male bags of air sent from Mount Olympus.
Like ‘Twin Peaks,’ ‘24,’ ‘Mad Men,’ and ‘The Sopranos’ before it, ‘Downton Abbey’ enriches the iconography and collective lore of pop culture. It replenishes the stream.
Like Andy Warhol and unlike God Almighty, Larry King does not presume to judge; all celebrities are equal in his eyes, saints and sinners alike sharing the same ‘Love Boat’ voyage into the dark beyond, a former sitcom star as deserving of pious send-off as Princess Diana.
Mitt Romney – he had a Rock Hudson thing going, shoeblack hair and a well-hung resume, but even for a shameless, position-shifting phony he seemed a trifle insincere.
Since I’m a fan of collections and anthologies, believe that the best writing often shines in shards and galloping stretches, I never find myself lobbying for a writer I enjoy reading regularly to hole up in Heidegger’s hut for four or five years to bring forth a mountain.
Popular culture no longer craves archangels and new dawns. Pop culture traffics in vampires and deads of night.