Word: harshly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...answer was simple enough. Satirizing the pop politics of California's Governor Jerry Brown, Trudeau had turned his biting pen on a labor lawyer and Brown contributor, Sidney Korshak, describing him with several harsh characterizations, including "known organized crime figure." While Korshak is no stranger to criminal investigators, the newspapers felt, as the Times put it, that the cartoons were "unfair, irresponsible and unsubstantiated." Callers accused the papers of trying to protect Brown. Said the Guv: "I think it is false and libelous, but I'm flattered by the attention...
PERHAPS IT IS this hesitancy to generalize, to offer weighty and solemn judgments, that makes Didion's writing so evocative. Instead of pronouncements, she offers reportage. She focuses on an incident and notes every detail in uncluttered, harsh prose. Didion also has the reporter's curiosity about how things work. She investigates how orchids are tended, how freeways are monitored, how lifeguards live, how dams work, the philosophy and history of shopping malls. She is always honest in her examination of a setting or person. She damns through accuracy, not forceful moral argument. In "Bureaucrats," for example, she perfectly captures...
...industrial nations, a forced limit on petroleum imports, will, their leaders agree, bring about a lowering of living standards. In the immediate future, the U.S. most likely will be able to accomplish its goal of holding imports to 8.5 million bbl. per day only by taking one of two harsh steps: either rationing gasoline or eliminating price controls on it. The former would lead to a bureaucratic mess; the latter would probably aggravate inflation. The choice is hard. But, as in so many matters in the crisis caused by OPEC, there is no middle ground...
...partition of British India, in 1947, 15 million were dispossessed. In 1950, 5 million North Koreans fled to the South; a few years later, a similar southward exodus took place in Viet Nam, as hundreds of thousands of Roman Catholics and Buddhists fled from Hanoi's harsh rule...
Statler and Waldorf, the old geezers who heckle the TV show, pop up long enough for Statler to say, "I've seen detergents that leave better films than this." This is too harsh, though even an addicted Muppet fan must admit that the movie has draggy stretches. The transition from the yank-'em-off-if-they-bomb lunacy of the TV show to the coherent narration of the film is not a complete success. Muppet magic remains a bewildering succession of wonderful bits, and perhaps the movie's best occurs when Rowlf...