Word: ghoulishness
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...Amin bias of the Kenyan press, Western diplomats in Africa were inclined to believe that there had been an attempt on his life. They also thought it probable that some form of vengeful slaughter was going on inside the country. Under Amin, after all, random killing has become a ghoulish national pastime...
THIS SPECULATION leads to the prophecies of a Cassandra, but the prospect of statehood does evoke ghoulish images. The cruellest trick for exterminating coyotes on the western ranges is to freeze a compressed spring inside a chunk of horsemeat. When the greedy animal gulps it down, his body heat melts the ice and the spring expands, piercing his stomach. It may seem expedient now to offer statehood to Puerto Rico rather than be discredited internationally as colonialists; to many Puerto Ricans it seems equally comfortable to be swallowed by the wealthiest best on earth. Ford could go down in history...
...wolf man is dead!" So wrote Broadway Bard Damon Runyon on the front page of the now defunct New York Daily Mirror as he led a nationwide chorus of ghoulish jubilation over the 1936 electrocution of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, convicted kidnaper of the infant son of Charles Lindbergh. Four decades later a forthcoming book, Scapegoat (Putnam), by Anthony Scaduto, a longtime crime reporter for the New York Post, argues that Hauptmann was innocent. Scaduto says he has unearthed police documents showing not only that someone other than Hauptmann cashed in most of the ransom certificates but that the authorities suppressed...
Police officials speculated that the kidnapers not only spent more than $10,000 to underwrite the ghoulish venture but also planned it in chilling detail. The kidnapers took care to stock the big truck with water, blankets and a small chemical toilet, and to install two air vents before it was buried. They apparently spent a good deal of time in Chowchilla studying the movements of the schoolchildren; when they finally ambushed the school bus, they did so at a place and a time when they knew nobody would be around...
...sacred rituals out of the decent burial of the dead. Individually and collectively, society may well be un able to endure a prolonged look at the physical aftereffects of death. The central mystery of existence - the end that unites everyone even as it divides them - cannot be reduced to ghoulish titillation without the possibility of serious consequences. Even in Shakespeare's most grotesque play, Titus Andronicus ("Enter a messenger with two heads and a hand"), the gruesome details are always treated as if they were unquestionably monstrous. But in City of the Dead the world is regarded...