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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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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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Even the most piddling life is of momentous consequence to its owner.
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Broadway purists may deplore the influx of movie-spinoff musicals in recent years, wishing someone would turn off the popcorn machine and let more imaginative brainstorms blow through.
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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.
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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.
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People want somebody to be a daredevil, even if they're not going to be a daredevil themselves.
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I never accepted why there should be some invisible, wavy cutoff line separating Great Fiction from phosphorescent beauties and dollhouse miniatures, novels that contain a whole world in a snow globe.
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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.
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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.
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The unhappy irony is that, while 'Glee' is hitting the heights, school arts funding is being slashed across the country due to the steep recession and declining tax revenues.
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My high-school papers, my college-application essays, read like Norman Mailer packed in a crunchy-peanut-butter sandwich.
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Whenever I catch a chunk of an Adam Sandler comedy on cable, it looks as badly shot and goofily tossed off as a Jerry Lewis gag reel once he hit the late downslide with 'Hardly Working' and 'Cracking Up.'
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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.
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With 'Black Swan,' the ballerina saga flips its tiara and goes on a hallucinatory bender, a scary acid trip where transfiguration and disfiguration meet.
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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.
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I think ambition is a desire for recognition. People want to be special. I think ambition can take in a whole package of things, power or sexual excitement.
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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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Who elected Larry King America's grief counselor? We, the viewing public, did, by driving up his ratings whenever somebody famous passes.
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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.
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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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