Word: brutalize
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...Ryder is at times a brutal, violent play. Teddy savages and humiliates his victims mentally and physically with relentless sadism. He is so belligerent that one wonders how he could have been driven to such a state of mind, and Medoff offers no real explanations. Teddy is a war veteran and a "disaffected youth," but somehow this does not adequately explain his attitude toward humanity. All too often he becomes more of an authorial mouthpiece than a coherent character, and when he says at the end that he wishes he could be sorry for what he has done it really...
Things start to roll in earnest when Teddy arrives with his girlfriend, Cheryl. Very soon, the psychopathically hostile hippie has alienated everyone, shattered their self-made fronts, and catapulted them into a nightmarish movie which he directs between outbursts of violence and brutal degradations of the other characters. Teddy bears the thematic weight of the play, battering the egos of Red and Richard with his brutality and cynicism until they have lost their illusions and their dignity and are forced to confront the truth about their vanity and foolishness...
...Hill. "I like Frank Moore," says one labor lobbyist about the President's chief congressional liaison, "but he's a greenhorn. He's lost in Congress." Carter's own mild approach to Congress is also at fault. Some veterans on the Hill vividly recall Lyndon Johnson's brutal lobbying as President. "What do you do when the President gets you on the phone and eats your consummate ass out?" asks Ribicoff about L.B.J. "He told me what a low-life bastard I was and how I'd better get right with
...senior officers must be Alawi). Inside Damascus, a special 9,000-man infantry division, commanded by Assad's brother Rifaat, protects the President and his regime. There are stories of Rifaat's ruthless excesses: people losing a choice villa or apartment because he wanted it for a friend, or brutal beatings of someone who is less than polite to Rifaat's intimates. Nonetheless, says a Western diplomat, "without Rifaat, Assad would not sleep as comfortably as he does...
...enormity of the tragedy has been carefully reconstructed from the reports of many eyewitnesses. Some political theorists have defended it, as George Bernard Shaw and other Western intellectuals defended the brutal social engineering in the Soviet Union during the 1930s. Yet it remains perhaps the most dreadful infliction of suffering on a nation by its government in the past three decades. The nation is Cambodia...