Word: aghast
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Caudill occasionally gets carried away by excessively aghast prose ("The heart flutters in contemplation" while "the greediest mind boggles"). He does not pretend to be impartial. He does not even pretend to be fair. He is a prophet returned from his well-ravaged wilderness with a specific case which, as others have before, asks a general Bicentennial-spoiling question: Will the U.S. go down in history as the land of opportunity that could not control its opportunists...
...that has taken over operation of most U.S. passenger trains. When it took over the Santa Fe's fabled Super Chief service from Chicago to Los Angeles, Amtrak kept the name but dropped the linen napkins and fresh-cut flowers that traditionally graced the dining car. John Reed, aghast at such a decline in standards, withdrew permission for Amtrak to continue calling the Super Chief by its proud old name...
...Aghast Officials. The gang floated its swag back through the sewers and to the waiting vans in a collapsible rubber boat and on a raft made of inner tubes. A note that the industrious looters left behind, signed with an inverted peace symbol, said simply: "No gunplay, no violence, no hate...
Bank officials were aghast, as well they might be. The managing director, Jacques Guenet, had been so convinced of his vault's impregnability that he had failed to install any kind of electronic alarm system. To save on wages, he had even sent the night watchman home on weekends. Guenet's wealthy depositors were displeased, to put it mildly. On the day following the discovery, angry crowds clogged the streets in front of the Société Générale...
...that some recent event has uttcrly discredited socialism. So he picks out the Solzhenitsyn and related cases as evidence that socialism itself, and not Stalinism, created the world's "bone heap... grisly beyond belief." He catalogues the Western literary community's boycott of Solzhenitsyn and seems to be aghast at the idea that lifelong leftists would not collapse like toy boats at the salvos of Solzhenitsyn, a Russian Orthodox dogmatic and rightist. What mindlessness. I guess Wolfe called the piece "The Intelligent Co-ed's Guide to America" because in his tough-minded telling of the facts and courageous exposure...