Word: brutish
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...reference to the canons of 18th and 19th century mainstream art, should now have lost their practical use and migrated to the museums. History cautions us not to think of pre-industrial America as a lost paradise; albums of 19th century photos like Wisconsin Death Trip remind us how brutish, crazed and short life could be in America then. But the folk art gathered in this show does counterbalance the pessimistic view with its vitality and awkward graces...
...Diderot sounds unjust, it is not simply because the tone of our culture has swung back to a less civilized amorality in which our pornography is brutish. It is because, when the routine conventions of his work are subtracted, Boucher remains a startling and almost great painter. The sensuousness, the lively plasticity of drawing, the marvelous sensitivity to color and texture, the ironic grasp of elaborate mythologies and allegories still remind us of Talleyrand's wistful epitaph on the ancien régime - that no one who did not live before the Revolution can know the sweetness of life...
...Struever, this evidence has important implications. "Our work has shown that life for early man was not necessarily nasty, brutish and short," he says. "Judging from all the clues we have found, man led the good life in the Illinois River valley. He had plenty of leisure time in which to domesticate pets. It's sheer folklore that primitive people had to struggle from dawn to dusk simply to survive." In short, the early Americans of the Illinois River valley, like their modern counterparts, enjoyed a relatively peaceful life and a highly enviable standard of living...
...high-level saturation prophets. His success as a futurist was based on a supreme confidence in man's worst instincts. For Wells, an atheist, theological good and evil did not exist. Original sin resided in the pinkish gray folds of the brain and expressed itself through brutish linkage, which operated the prehensile thumb. Given tools enough and time, Homo sapiens would turn the most charming toy, the most fetching theory, into a weapon...
Victoria gave the crown its prestige again. An iron toughness of spirit enabled her to do so. Indeed without such a will, even her childhood would have been insupportable. Her father, one of the brutish Hanoverian dukes, died when she was only one year old. The widowed duchess then came under the influence of an Irish swindler named John Conroy. It was he who set up the famous "Kensington system" for rearing Victoria. Its aim was to make her totally dependent upon her pathetic mother and so, by remote control, upon Conroy. Little Victoria had to sleep in her mother...