Word: downtrodden
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...James Agee and Plutarch. Most of his work is devoted to giving a forum to the voiceless; The South Goes North, like his other works, is the transcribed conversations he has had with hundreds of people. His work demonstrates his skill at getting the natural poetry of America's downtrodden to express itself more than it exhibits his own considerable writing talents. By talking to people as people instead of as sterile percentages, Coles paints faces on the nation's oppressed and allows the full dimension of reality to flower. He is always saying yes-but; yes, the mountaineer...
...difference: the new aristocracy's prerogatives would stem from genuine ability and hence, Herrnstein seems to imply, would be fair enough. In a warning, perhaps unintended, to those who might rebel, he writes that "the privileged classes of the past were probably not much superior biologically to the downtrodden, which is why revolutions had a fair chance of success." Herrnstein's implication is clear: rebellion against the new intellectual elite would be more likely to fail...
...downtrodden in Compton-Bur nett are the young people: lonely, badly dressed, capriciously mistreated. In Bullivant and the Lambs, perhaps her best book, they are used to create a series of comic tableaux. Asked what they are doing, one replies: "We are waiting for time to pass." Another spends his time rereading his favorite story, the book of Job. In The Last and the First, when the put-upon young Heriots and Grimstones meet for tea, a minor Heriot says, "We have been looking forward to the day." A Grimstone replies: "We would have done so, but the faculty...
...Mullin cheerfully admits that "I stole from everybody." But his familiar caricatures were strictly his own inventions. The Brooklyn Bum was born one afternoon in the 1930s after the downtrodden Dodgers dropped yet another game at Ebbets Field. A cab driver carrying Mullin back to Manhattan asked him, "How'd our Bums do today?" The designation seemed brilliantly appropriate, and the woebegone tramp made his debut in the paper next day. Mullin affectionately dubbed the Dodgers Bums, and the sobriquet stuck. Before long, other cartoonists were forced to devise their own bums to denote the Dodgers...
...spectator can follow the violent give and take, with the happy thought that here (unlike the world outside, full of successful villains and downtrodden good guys) infractions are almost always caught and the referees are almost always right. Here. if nowhere else, the wicked are penalized, and the honest are rewarded. A football game gives us a glimpse of Utopia; a society where freedom flourishes under law. Here the police intervene only when necessary. The decisions of the judges are not only final, but prompt and fair. Hulking titans submit their quarrels to a midget arbitrator-and go along with...