Word: corrupts
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...book was No. 1-in everything but prose. Thy Neighbor's Wife may appeal to the prurient, the innocent and the curious, but it dismays anyone devoted to English. It hardly corrupts the reader's morals, as some critics have charged, but it may help corrupt his language. The work, eight years in the making, publicized like a space shot, high on the charts, frequently reads as if translated from the Albanian: "This was when Jim Buckley met Al Goldstein, whose spy piece he helped to edit, and whose expressed frustrations he not only identified with...
...beginning all the world was America." John Locke's 300-year-old phrase still keeps its haunting simplicity. For generations, America meant the part of the earth that was not corrupt, not worn by labor, tainted by inequality or poisoned by greed. This myth of paradise-on-the-frontier pervaded 18th century ideas about America and, by the mid-19th, had become one of the chief regulating ideas of America's discourse about itself: "That unfallen, western world," as Melville wrote in Moby Dick, "which to the eyes of the old trappers and hunters revived the glories...
...system, whatever it is, seems corrupt when fear of prosecution motivates action. Presumably, most Americans refrain from murdering each other not because they don't want to go to jail but because they don't believe in murder. People don't sit in front of banks and say "well, if we can get 5 per cent of the population to stick up cashiers the district attorney will have a hell of a time trying to prosecute us." Young men understand that society will proceed just fine without registration; only their lives, entrusted to the government, may not continue normally...
America, in turn, could never quite get over the view of Europe as a seat of moral decay and corrupt sophistication. Looking at Europe in long historical perspective, Americans today certainly still see it as the creator of a glorious civilization. They also believe that, well into the 20th century, Europe was the creator of fanatical nationalisms and the builder of a colonial system from whose legacy we all still suffer. Many Americans point out bitterly that Europe plunged the world Into two global wars, only to be rescued from their disastrous consequences by America. Looking at Europe...
Brubaker, which is about the efforts of a warden to clean up what looks to be the foulest and most corrupt prison in America, is not as close to everyone's concerns as All the President's Men was, nor has it the knockabout charm of The Electric Horseman. But it is an often powerful film. Its most potent passages come at the beginning. Redford, in the title role, becomes an inmate in a prison in order to experience conditions there firsthand before he takes over as warden. Since I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang almost...