Word: cruelest
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...modifying the system through university politicizing, "the free play of ideas," etc., etc., then is silenced and jailed. Immediately he lies down in his cell to scribble a political statement on a roll of toilet paper, but the next morning he's released without being charged or heard. "The cruelest persecution." he learns, "is the persecution of silence," the repressive tolerance accorded him by the State, which renders all his actions not only ineffective but unreal. The Revolutionary asks much the same question as Zabriskie Point about the nature-or possibility-of real experience in a banal, totally artificial society...
...typically grim, fairy-tale props in Dog Years (1963), for instance, were magic spectacles that allowed postwar German children to see exactly what their innocent parents were actually doing between 1939 and 1945. The cruelest metaphor for greedy indifference occurs toward the end of The Tin Drum, when Oskar's father is killed in his grocery cellar by occupying Russian forces. His body falls across the path of some ants that have set up supply lines to a smashed sack of sugar. "The ants found themselves facing a new situation," Grass wrote, "but, undismayed by the detour, soon built...
...craze largely unknown to the post-war generation, is one of the saddest cultural artifacts of the Great Depression. These widely publicized exercises in masochism, in which couples would compete to see who could stay on a dance floor the longest (sometimes two and three months), were actually the cruelest of promotional gimmicks. The businessmen who ran them charged admission to the sadistic audiences who watched, solicited business "sponsors" for the couples-and cleaned up in the process. Even the grand prize offered to the winners would be a phony: the marathon's "bills" would suddenly be subtracted from...
...first place." Nor is it always wise for a therapist to intervene when he sees a child being badly treated, believes Psychiatric Social Worker Elizabeth Davoren, who took part in the Colorado study. "Protecting a child when you cannot continue such protection beyond the moment may be the cruelest thing...
...pushing through a stiff anti-fraud voting law aimed at the kind of ballot-box finagling for which Cook County is famous. Another Ogilvie-backed bill would make Chicago's mayoralty election nonpartisan; when candidates must run without official party labels, organizational control over them is weakened. The cruelest thrust against Daley is a proposal to reform Chicago's civil service system and thus wreck the giant patronage network that has maintained the Daley combine as one of the last of the oldtime machines. Ogilvie associates added to the mayor's woes last week by backing...