Word: conning
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...popular geography-in the hillbilly world of Li'I Abner: "The new comics are the real Black Humorists." In Walt Kelly's Pogo, a group of peculiarly human denizens of Okefinokee Swamp -a cigar-chewing alligator, a bespectacled owl, a turtle sporting a derby-play with words, con one another, and offer the only trenchant political satire to be found in the comics today. In Johnny Hart's B.C., indolent cavemen, sharpshooting anteaters and terrified ants make droll comments on the modern world. In Mell Lazarus' Miss Peach, megacephalic, supersophisticated school tots show up their elders...
...couch but on "the Shelf"-jailbird slang for the solitary-confinement cells at San Quentin prison. Before he was 21, Sands was serving time on three convictions for armed robbery, with sentences in each of from one year to life, and had won a reputation as a con so "solid" that not even brutal beatings by guards could bend him to prison rules...
...problem, Sands holds, is to unscramble the convict's twisted values of what is smart and what is dumb. "I've been a con, as smart and tough as they come," he tells the prisoners, "but I'm not a wise guy any more. All the wise guys I know are in here-the smartest ones of all didn't even come to the show, they're in the hole. They call guys like me square Johns, dummies. Yeah. All us square Johns are on the outside...
...con, Sands believes all sentences for major offenses should be the same: one year to life. After the first year, release would come as soon as a prisoner had truly rehabilitated himself -or never, if he failed to reform...
...almost constant self-doubt. For 30 years, the man who first said that "politics is the art of the possible" manipulated the events of a continent simply because he knew how to manipulate people. The Iron Chancellor, in Richter's view, was one of history's nimblest con...