Word: despairful
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...ready to accept democratic forms, including elections. Not surprisingly, the French left's reaction has been sharp. The usually left-leaning daily Le Monde has gamely praised the "passionate challenge" raised by the New Philosophers. But the socialist Le Matin has flatly condemned their thinking as "elegant despair" and "a banal form of dandyism." A commentator in the pro-Socialist Nouvel Observateur blasted the New Philosophers as mere "disc jockeys of ideas...
Such signs of rage and despair have been all too familiar since court-ordered busing first began. Yet as schools open around the country, there is encouraging evidence that Chicago's tensions-if not its desegregation problems-are far from typical. For a variety of reasons, busing is no longer education's most controversial issue. Many cities have accepted it as a fait accompli either from sheer fatigue, distraction over declining educational standards, or because in some places busing has worked better than expected...
...challenge this belief and quite another to write a novel showing it to be false. Authors who try generally find themselves accused of going soft, of frivolously aping the Pollyanna fadeouts of popular schlock. To counter such charges, Fowles fills Daniel Martin with plenty of reasons for contemporary despair: war, poverty, tyrannies of the body and mind, mankind's apparent inability to do anything about problems except augment them. His hero tries "to discover what had gone wrong, not only with Daniel Martin, but his generation, age, century; the unique selfishness of it, the futility, the ubiquitous addiction...
...this jaded day, it takes nerve to present the shockaholic public with a romance unmitigated by violence, treachery, despair, psychosis or death, not even an ugly disease. A similar risk would be to serve Kool-Aid to cocaine sniffers. Surely the hazard is doubled when the offering is built on the doings of two gerontic specimens who do not even talk dirty or expose any personal equipage more intimate than the inside of an umbrella...
...fleetingly by most middle-class Americans as they rush by in their cars or commuter trains?doors locked, windows closed, moving fast. But out there is a different world, a place of pock-marked streets, gutted tenements and broken hopes. Affluent people know little about this world, except when despair makes it erupt explosively onto Page One or the 7 o'clock news. Behind its crumbling walls lives a large group of people who are more intractable, more socially alien and more hostile than almost anyone had imagined. They are the unreachables: the American underclass...