Still others were proven hacks who combined Trump's need for obeisance with the requisite contempt for truth: the servile ex-chief of staff Reince Priebus; Sean Spicer, Trump's linguistically deficient first spokesman; Spicer's saturnine successor Sarah Sanders, who makes even her predecessor's press briefings look like oases of transparency.
As "The Company Way" suggests, what theater people fear most from the corporate world is not so much greed as a need for obeisance to the archenemy of art: conformity.
I'm reliably informed by people who were there that the first preview at the New London Theatre of Ian McKellen's King Lear found a sizeable percentage of the house standing in due obeisance of an actor who folded his appreciation of the American proclivity for such things into his Tony Award acceptance speech for Amadeus a quarter-century ago.
I paid obeisance to the dead, prayed for good health.
She had "both a distaste for sycophancy and a need for a certain degree of obeisance," and she sends very mixed signals, even now.
"It's a way for them to pay obeisance to the NRA without changing the world as it is".
If he lives and for all their theatrical obeisance, some of Chechnya's other strongmen loathe him, as do many Russian officers what more might he want Mr Putin, his partner and patron, is due to leave office in 2008.
These three luminaries do not feature in a list that, give or take some nonsense from Paul McCartney and a few other contemporary composers of quasi-religious tosh and the obligatory obeisance to Hollywood (Howard Shore's score for The Lord of the Rings comes in at number 46, one place below Beethoven's Violin Concerto), is entirely predictable.
Those old hands may be prone to repeating their parties' talking points, but at least they have experience in the White House or in multiple campaigns, and they know they're supposed to be offering some kind of insider's insight into the process that may not always pay robotic obeisance to the candidate they worked for most recently.
So far you may not know whether I am paying obeisance, responding to indigestion, or looking for a wayward contact lens.
