Word: fecklessness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...everyone wants to be just like him. He's sitting there, unflappable and detached and looking sharp in a Yohji Yamamoto suit amid the third-rate chaos swirling around him. That's how most Japanese want to see themselves. Their nation has become an economic and political farce. Feckless, forgettable Prime Ministers come and go. The moribund economy has come to resemble more the surreal vision of Salvador Dali than the sound blueprint of Adam Smith. And for the first time since World War II, the average Japanese faces the prospect of a diminishing standard of living. It's third...
...foreigners entered the E.U. illegally last year, five times the number in 1994. And as the demand to enter Europe has widened, so have the opportunities for traffickers who would profit from these masses on the move. Scores of immigrants now put their lives in the hands of feckless smugglers, with tragic results. Hundreds die crossing the Mediterranean into Spain each year; last week the corpses of 10 more North African immigrants washed up on Spain's southern shores...
...premature release of a local wonder drug ended in scandal when the drug turned out to be made of industrial solvent. Those fiascoes left the government skittish about embracing expensive programs, inspiring a 1998 decision not to provide azt to HIV-positive pregnant women. Zimbabwe too suffers savagely from feckless leadership. Even in Botswana, where the will to act is gathering strength, the resources to follow through have to come from foreign hands...
...Rides of the Midway (Norton; 316 pages; $25.95) involves eye-popping quantities of liquor and drugs. Those pursuits leave Noel increasingly at odds with the God-fearing Southerners around him, particularly his stepfather, who looks remarkably like Billy Graham. Mississippi-raised author Lee Durkee portrays his hero's feckless dissolution with considerable comic flair and a sharp eye for regional manners, good and bad. There isn't much profundity on display here, but readers will finish the book feeling they've been treated to quite a ride...
...When Bill was a boy, his mother installed him in the master bedroom of the house, while she and Bill's feckless stepfather took the guest room. The $750,000-a-year Carnegie Hall Tower penthouse office suite with views of Central Park involves the same droit de junior. It's an Arkansas Nero effect. When the Emperor Nero entered his Golden House for the first time, he inspected the statue of himself, 120 feet high; he admired the enclosed lake, the pillared arcade that stretched for a mile, the dining rooms paved with porphyry, and ceilings of gold...