Word: despairful
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When Ferdinand Marcos was elected the sixth President of the Philippines ten years ago, his island nation was in political turmoil. Even his opponents concede that Marcos, 58, has revived the Philippine economy and brought the country safely through a period of "anarchy, public confusion, terror and despair. "But the price has been high. Three years ago, Marcos imposed martial law and made himself a virtual dictator. Today an estimated 6,000 political prisoners are still in jail, including former Liberal Party Secretary-General Benigno Aquino Jr., 43, who might have defeated Marcos if elections had been held...
...does not do that. Like the soaps, it is a dense family drama, but there the resemblance ends. Upstairs, Downstairs reflects a society in which masters and servants are bound to each other by shared and common memories. There is an intimacy, both abrasive and comforting, that precludes abandonment, despair and uncontrollable passions. Soap operas, on the other hand, are folk tales that tug at the soul of a nation of strangers for whom television itself is a bond. Tolstoy thought that unhappy families were unhappy in different ways. But a Madison Avenue philosopher, selling sex and suffering...
...tears. For seven years, she has been the troublemaking Julie of Days of Our Lives whose voluptuous cleavage and lustrous black eyes get her every guy in Salem except the one she really wants -Doug Williams. Fate has kept Julie from Doug- a torture that regularly throws her into despair and hysteria. For her performance, however, Susan rates nothing but hyperbole. Says Joan Blondell: "I don't know anyone but Sarah Bernhardt who could sustain all that suffering so long...
Will has not completely given up to despair but he sees little chance of reversing the decay of the liberal, bourgeois civilization he cherishes. "The question," he says, "is how is it possible to have a quickened sense of anxiety, in the public at large, about the growing power of the state, the growing ugliness of life, and the general undisciplined nature of public and private appetites." He shakes his head. "And I'm not very hopeful about that...
...industrialized nations and the poverty, misery and despair that blankets half the world's inhabitants. An estimated 1 billion of them suffer in some degree from malnutrition; perhaps half a million die of starvation annually. Lacking sanitary water as well as insecticides and disinfectants, tens of millions are struck down with debilitating disease-malaria, typhoid, hookworm, dysentery, cholera...