Word: greed
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Back around the turn of the century, when official racism stood tall, Americans were capable of incredible generosity toward our "little brown brothers" overseas. Oh, without doubt, our foreign activities were often spurred by greed. But for the broad mass of people, whose support for such adventures was crucial, American imperialism represented a genuinely moral, Christian undertaking (this was before Christianity became unfashionable...
...barbed polearms plaster our television screens with fair frequency. But the killing that took place so close to me was different. The thief did not strangle the woman because of politics or clan rivalry, which lead to so much of the violence in the country. His only motivation was greed. He was a burglar who saw an opportunity in a society whose standards of law and order continue steadily to deteriorate...
Nothing dates so fast as novelty, and nothing ill becomes a playwright so drastically as having mature peaks contrasted with juvenilia. Thus no one is served, neither writer nor audience, by reviving Peter Shaffer's one-acts about sex, greed and self-deceit. White Liars, the opener, has been rewritten but remains derivative sentimentality about an old East European immigrant barely getting by as a fortune teller on the holiday coast of England. Black Comedy relies on the gimmick of pretending that lights are out when they are on, so people stumble about in unintended sexual tangles while the audience...
...story line, as spelled out on Side 1 (this is an album best appreciated on cassette or, gasp!, vinyl), is of a man on the emotional ledge. To brassily assonant music, he rages at a social landscape scarred by greed, fame % mongering, obsessive love -- all the strategies of self. He crankily attacks former friends in The Great Wall of China, life on the road ("In hell there's a big hotel/ Where the bar's just closed and the windows never open") in Blonde over Blue, his own no-account depression in A Minor Variation. By the fifth song, though...
Charles Keating Jr., whose greed and recklessness made him an apt symbol of the savings and loan calamity, was sentenced to 12 1/2 years in prison for draining the Irvine, California-based Lincoln Savings, a swindle that cost taxpayers $2.6 billion. The sentence will run concurrently with a 10-year state prison sentence that Keating, 69, is serving...