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Used to be, conservatives revered the Average American, that Norman Rockwell oil painting of diner food, humble faith, honest toil, and Capraesque virtue.

James Wolcott

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James Wolcott
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: December 10
Journalist
Novelist
New York City
New York
American
Toil
Faith
Oil
Used
Humble
Average
Diner
Painting
Diners
Honest
Revered
Food
Norman
Virtue
Conservatives

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It's the contemporary woman that movies don't know what to do with, other than bathe her in a bridal glow in romantic comedies where both the romance and the comedy are artificial sweeteners.
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In the voyeurism of Reality TV, the viewer's passivity is kept intact, pampered and massaged and force-fed Chicken McNuggets of carefully edited snippets that permit him or her to sit in easy judgment and feel superior at watching familiar strangers make fools of themselves. Reality TV looks in only one direction: down.
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What had brought me to New York in the autumn of 1972 was a letter of recommendation written by Norman Mailer, the author of 'The Naked and the Dead' and American literature's leading heavyweight contender, to Dan Wolf, the delphic editor of 'The Village Voice.'
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Book-jacket design may become a lost art, like album-cover design, without which late-20th-century iconography would have been pauperized.
James Wolcott
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The advent of DVD/Blu-ray reissues of classic Hollywood and foreign films has been a boon to film buffs, who can now study their favorites in all their glistening detail and restored palettes.
James Wolcott
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As we divest ourselves of once familiar physical objects - digitize and dematerialize - we approach a 'Star Trek' future in which everything can be accessed from the fourth dimension with a few clicks or terse audibles.
James Wolcott
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Even the most piddling life is of momentous consequence to its owner.
James Wolcott
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What a turnaround in sentiment 'Glee' exemplifies. It was only a few years ago that pursuing the dream of a Broadway career or cabaret stardom relegated some poor yearning dope to a lavender ghetto of losers, self-deluders, and social rejects.
James Wolcott
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My high-school papers, my college-application essays, read like Norman Mailer packed in a crunchy-peanut-butter sandwich.
James Wolcott
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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.
James Wolcott
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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.
James Wolcott
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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.
James Wolcott
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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.
James Wolcott
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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.
James Wolcott
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It's one thing to fight for what you believe in, another thing to fight for what others believe in.
James Wolcott
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At 'The Village Voice,' there were all these fevers inside the offices, that would break out into full-scale rumbles between writers.
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I understand the people-watching, but I've never done it where people have to race to three different shows, from here to there. I mean, the biggest zoo I ever faced was Comic Con, and Comic Con takes place in one big hangar.
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Popular culture no longer craves archangels and new dawns. Pop culture traffics in vampires and deads of night.
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On August 28, 2010, Fox News messiah Glenn Beck hosted a 'Restoring Honor' revival meeting featuring sexy guest star Sarah Palin, much as Bob Hope would roll out Raquel Welch in white go-go boots on his U.S.O. tours to give our fighting men a morale lift in their khakis.
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Who elected Larry King America's grief counselor? We, the viewing public, did, by driving up his ratings whenever somebody famous passes.
James Wolcott