Word: greed
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Payola, Golden Eggs and Greed...
...raised under the impression that capitalism was a system of the people, by the people and for the people. The greed and graft demonstrated by Lockheed and other corporate giants has led me to believe that they have one overriding ambition: to take from the people and from the people and from the people...
...especially pitiable to watch the eyes of the ladies grow round with greed as pheasants and lobsters, sorbets and desserts, are presented to them. Even those who do not betray their appetite by staring, who continue to talk with animation of other subjects, give themselves away when, without warning, a polite and cultivated syllable will suddenly drown in an excess of saliva. Yet it is a reckless woman who dares take more than a small slice of some favorite dish, for should she eat as much as she likes, she will simply faint dead away, as the corsets they wear...
Other films on the program are more interesting visually, but the most topically amusing short is one by Bruno Bozzeta called "Self-Service," a parable of industrialization, energy consumption, and insatiable greed. Mosquitos in search of a square meal keep trying to attach their snouts to a human's skin despite inevitable smushing. When the human falls asleep, skeeter entrepreneurs erect oil wells and canning factories to the gruntlement (that's the opposite of disgruntlement) of skeeters everywhere. But the human wakes up, and the gibbering insects flee to the sanctuary of a church, where the Great Fickle Finger...
Fourth, intellectuals can generally be trusted in the most prosaic sense of that term. Intellectuals tend to believe in the life of the mind and that belief exists independently of sheer ambition or greed. The ability philosophically to accept defeat at the polls or in party councils is a factor of one's ability to function in a world in which that kind of success is not as important as it is elsewhere. Intangible although this may be, it lends a quality of independence of judgment and action which sets a different and better standard than electoral success...