Word: cons
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Rojack (like Mailer?) con- ducts his life as if it were some black experiment, he needs the battle even when life itself has almost been kicked out of him, needs the action, the booze, the orgasm--that inescapable moment--even with the fetid breath of murder and suicide and madness congealing in his nostrils. Even dizzy on the parapet, exhausted in the desert, he pushes on, tracking the devil, hunting out a more ultimate disaster; ready, even on the precipice of collapse, to go the very depths of possible experience...
...Dream of the Heiress polluted by Deborah's guileful malevolence; The Alger Dream of self-made empires gone rotten in her father's diabolic machinations; The Westerner Dream of the loner on the borderlines of society perverted now by the company he must keep; The Dreams of the Con Man, The Urban Gangster, The White Negro (a myth Mailer helped himself to make) all corrupted, immeasureably soiled by the evil of our national life until there are tenable dreams no longer but only the will, and the courage if not the strength to escape to Guatamala or Yucatan...
...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...
...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...