Word: brutish
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...people deliberately set out to establish its political life on a principle so pure. Some argue that it is too pure a principle for fallible men. George III may be wrongheaded, they acknowledge, but the British monarchy is all that stands between the Americans and discord, disunity, and that brutish world of brutish men that the English Philosopher Thomas Hobbes envisioned more than a century ago. These skeptics dismiss as naive optimism the arguments of the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau that natural man is good and is corrupted only by society. Nor, they go on, is equality...
...enter our Bicentennial year confused, properly humbled, but not necessarily despondent. The conditions of life in the innermost parts of many of our older cities have become, in Thomas Hobbes' phrase, "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." The near collapse of family structure and communal life in these areas has created, for tens of thousands of people, especially young ones, a social catastrophe that the conventional institutions of a free society are, in the short run, powerless to correct. But for different people and at different times, much the same thing happened: in the cities of the 1830s...
...profile of the typical sex offender, a street punk making his way up from petty theft to murder. No, he is Margaux's kid sister's music teacher, soliciting her influence to gain a hearing for his electronic compositions. Nor is his attack a brutish lunge out of the dark. The rape is strictly high fashion - a handsome bedroom setting, the victim tied prettily with silk scarves while he sodomizes her, the whole busi ness staged and photographed with stylish prurience...
Helene then moves home and husband to a life of rural seclusion. She protects her infant son Oswald from his brutish father by packing him off to boarding school at an early age. When the Captain impregnates the maid, Helene quickly marries her off to a carpenter named Engstrand and raises the child Regina in her own home. If she can't save the man's conscience, she can at least salvage his reputation; Helene busies herself with philanthropy while her husband garners the glory...
...doesn't change a sick child's bandage or decide whether the dinner eggplant should be sliced or diced it doesn't get done since no one else in the family is willing or able to help her. The last vestiges of the love for which Clara and her brutish husband (Renato Salvatori) married back in the southern countryside have vanished in the North, along with their hopes for a better life--shattered by poverty, overcrowding, and discrimination. All that remains is the grotesque stereotype of Italian machismo--burlesqued so successfully in The Seduction of Mimi-- in which a wife...