Word: despairful
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...Warren Gamaliel Harding is talking to a newspaper columnist. The eminent man says: "Oftentimes, as I sit here, I don't seem to grasp that I am President." The statement is too good not to be true. In fact, the entire Harding Administration is a humorist's despair; at a certain point, venality and incompetence simply transcend parody. Historian Charles L. Mee Jr. understands this. His brisk, hilarious retelling of the Harding saga resembles a series of blackout sketches. Facts are trotted out quickly, to speak and bray for themselves...
...intellect with all the subtlety of a file on the teeth. When he tips in the other direction, his short circuits more resemble the random firing of brain synapses and he is in danger, as Tom McGuane says of "being trapped in a globe of his own hallucinatory despair." It's a precarious balancing act, and one which makes Shepard so much more a playwright than a writer of plays. Reading a Shepard script is an exercise in boredom at worst and frustration at best. A bad production, and you leave feeling that terrible wired disappointment of the long slide...
Richard Nixon harbored some of Johnson's political sentiments about the purposes and authority of the court. The Senate rejection of his nominees, Clement Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell, is now history. Nixon was in utter despair when he learned that his own appointee, Chief Justice Warren Burger, had ruled that Nixon had to surrender the White House tapes. That was a pivotal drama in the Watergate scandal. Things were changing...
Kylian immediately sets a specific tone and atmosphere. His work is often frankly emotional, whether it is the bleak despair of Soldiers' Mass, the pathos of Overgrown Path, the slapstick comedy of Symphony in D or the heroic striving of Sinfonietta, the company's signature piece...
...much or fear violence too much, before you become a thing, no longer a man ... lending yourself to every conceivable low, evil, degrading act anyone tells you to do." Or, like Abbott, you exert beastliness to preserve the soul. In the penitentiary world, he says, a man can "despair because he cannot bring himself to murder...