Word: cafard
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...blame and the expansion of rights goes on without the other half of citizenship: attachment to duties and obligations. We are seeing a public recoil from formal politics, from the active, reasoned exercise of citizenship. It comes because we don't trust anyone. It is part of the cafard the '80s induced: Wall Street robbery, the savings and loan scandal, the wholesale plunder of the economy, an orgy released by Reaganomics that went on for years with hardly a peep from Congress -- events whose numbers were so huge as to be beyond the comprehension of most people...
...things fall apart-both literally and figuratively. The piano sinks through the termite-ridden floor, the chandelier is unlit, the glasses are broken, the cattle die of foot-and-mouth disease, and one of the lions is decapitated by one of the characters in a fit of rage. Colonial cafard-suffocating apathy-has set in. Nevertheless, Archie keeps up the forms of the sahib-settler's life. It is a gruesome parody of colonial ritual. There is tennis every afternoon with his daughter, after which they sit for the "sundowner" before dinner, served by a "boy" in a sashed...
Like a Gypsy. Records are expensive in France, but some of Bechet's are top sellers at about 30,000-100,000 copies each. Among his titles: As-Tu le Cafard? (Have You Got the Blues?) and Mets ton Vieux Bonnet Gris (Put On Your Old Grey Bonnet...
...turned art student in the Latin Quarter, lived with a collector of poisonous serpents. His friends lived with far-from-poisonous mistresses, whom they obtained through the Montmartre want-ad columns. Sample ad: "Artist, young, tall, healthy and sincere, seeks feminine friend (18-22), brunette, to chase away cafard (the beetle of loneliness), pretty, well formed, pretty legs, healthy, sincere, pecuniarily disinterested, affectionate; for durable relations; send photograph; professionals keep away...
There is le cafard, too, the blues that lonely, tired women get the world over after a long day's work. But the jobs begin again the next morning. How many women are engaged in the French armament industry is a military secret. In the last war there were 400,000. Twenty years of complication and perfection of the sinews of mechanical war cannot have reduced the number...