Word: debauch
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...prison" and that hell knows no torment like an Englishman at the hunt ball whose jacket fails to fit. Alas, The Upstart stipulates that exactly this sort of class embarrassment can still drive a dated Angry Young Man to organize ten years of his life so that he may debauch the daughters of the neighboring lord of the manor in their silk-sheeted beds, wipe out the son's inheritance at roulette and, with a nasty sneer, take over the manor himself...
...universal catharsis is a short commodity lately. Everyone seems to end up in their own Edge City, and allowing Time magazine to push debauch one week and utopia the next without contradicting itself. Mailer suggested a few years ago that war may be the final tonic, that we should "buy a tract of land somewhere in Amazon . . . and throw in Marines and Seabeas and Air Force . . . invite them all, the Chinks and the Aussies, the Frogs and the Gooks and the Wogs . . . We'll have war games with real bullets and real flame throwers, real hot-wire correspondents...
...sure. He dumps cruelly on two girls who love him (Susan in Zurs and Emily in New York). His thoughts are too often too rich and too banal. (Experiences are frequently described as "nice" and "good.") He develops a minor drinking problem and it becomes a self-conscious preppie debauch...
...their time, and look back wistfully to past classics. Having thus conveniently suspended the present in cultural malaise, the two head off to a banquet/orgy given by Trimalchio. a fat old fart whom Petronius, the author of the original Satyricon, patterned after the Emperor Nero. The debauch at the party is complete, happily (for me) beyond the descriptive power of adjectives and adverbs. Merriment is cooled by a breach of good taste when Eumolphus accuses Trimalchio of plagiarizing Lucretius, Obviously he is correct, for Trimalchio immediately orders him thrown into a fire...
...SAID that every people has the government it deserves," Bernard Shaw once wrote. "It is more to the point that every government has the electorate at deserves; for the orators, of the front bench can edify or debauch an ignorant electorate at will. Thus our democracy moves in a vicious circle of reciprocal worthiness and unworthiness." A prominent Boston doctor goes somewhat further. "Bostonians are basically thieves," he says, and they always put people in office that they can identify with...