Word: clawingly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Picture the rubble of post-war Germany, where gutted buildings abound, sad-eyed people claw for packs of cigarrettes, and gaunt Red Cross workers spoon out soup to the destitute. Germany survived the war, but can it now survive the peace...
...only when she offers a "piece of herself, transferred to his ribs, his kidneys, as pain." Love attaches itself only "to what we cannot help," Updike observes grimly. In another tale of marital wrangling, then, the wife gets through to her husband only by inducing desperation like a "hooked claw," evolving "psychic protuberances that penetrated and embraced his mind." Just in case you didn't get it, in "The Journal of the Leper," the leprous creature is no longer loved by his woman once he is cured. So instead his characters learn to withdraw; they stick wax ear plugs...
Joey of course, deserted by his famous mother, has taken to heroin and discovered the joys of sex with a pudgy little Italian girl. Mom finds out and for the next two hours Luna repeats a tiresome pattern of hit, scream, claw and shoot-up until the end mercifully arrives. The operatic finale in which all problems find their resolution through song makes the Sound of Music appear profound...
...find to be hopeful about? As it turns out, almost everything. Most simply, Thomas argues that the overwhelming tendency in nature is toward symbiosis, union, harmony. The post-Darwinian view of life as a constant, murderous struggle, Tennyson's personification of nature "red in tooth and claw," do not match the facts that Thomas has seen. Even what looks like random slaughter may be the opposite...
...decaying inner cities, and when Thatcher herself subscribes to the rhetoric of Hayek and Milton Friedman, she cannot be totally surprised if some fear the worst consequences in a country used to 'fair play,' a sense of decency and give-and-take, instead of the tooth-and-claw competition of the unfettered market economy. Of course, it is always possible--as many believe and as some progressive Conservatives hope--that the realities of power may temper Mrs. Thatcher and convince her to follow the consensus politics of the past. If she will not, or if she cannot, the divisions...