Word: despairful
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...couple of weeks ago, the New York Times ran a photo of author and historian William Manchester on Page One. His face was the image of despair--diluted blue eyes, a ladder of creases on his forehead--though if one did not read the story that the photo illustrated, it might have appeared that Manchester had been caught at a moment of alert creativity. The story, however, was about his inability to create, to write. At age 79, paralyzed in his left leg by two strokes suffered after his wife's death in 1998, he finds that he cannot complete...
...despair, disgust, and disillusionment of the last eleven months has come the increasingly tempting idea of "unilateral separation." What does that mean, exactly? Not quite clear. As former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak explains it, "We'll be here and they'll be there." In between, a presumably impenetrable barrier. Split the house into two units, with iron doors locked and bolted between them, and razor wire on the windows. The cobra has one condominium, the mongoose gets the other. It's not a happy way to live, but it would be better, for both sides, than today's vicious...
...poverty and despair of daily life in the West Bank and Gaza certainly makes young Palestinian men more receptive to the monstrous promises made by Hamas and Islamic Jihad that suicide bombers earn a their way into a kind of heavenly VIP lounge, complete with the bizarre guarantees of salvation for 70 of their relatives and the right to have their way with 70 virgins in paradise. And yet the fundamentalist movements of Afghanistan and Egypt are a reminder that the most extreme distortions of Islam tend to gestate in situations of the most extreme social and economic conditions...
...record contract. But as a job description, "diva" carries certain burdens. One must not only sing one's heart out; one must expose it to the harshest elements. What becomes a legend most? Suffering. A childhood of deprivation; liaisons with powerful, possibly dangerous men; career triumph soured by personal despair. A life of melodrama makes the diva more human, thus more godlike, to her fans. A catchy moniker helps: Callas...Garland...Lady Day...Whitney. The singer in the news last week was no exception, seemingly groomed by her parents for divadom. For a start, they called the kid Mariah...
Today Foca's main street is a gallery of despair. Limping war veterans drink hard liquor from a can, scrutinizing every new car that strays into town and gruffly cutting off questions before they are asked. Local thugs in leather coats scowl as a visitor approaches. In 1998 a Human Rights Watch report estimated that no fewer than eight indicted war criminals lived here. A Muslim U.N. investigator who worked in Foca for two years felt compelled to spend the night a few miles down the road. At dusk, he says, "a shadow" descends on the town. Foca, he says...