Word: heathenism
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...jokes but has an indispensable role. When someone wants to keep a murder quiet, the corpse is fed--despite the cook's silent disgust--to Wu's pigs. (Which, yes, the townsfolk eat.) Even more essential are the Indians or, as they are dehumanizingly and incessantly called, "the godless heathen c__ksucker Sioux." Although it's two weeks after Custer's massacre at Little Bighorn, they don't appear, except as a constantly invoked and useful menace. Swearengen's road agents even scalp their victims to make it look like an Indian attack. You can't miss the post...
...usually regarded as a laundryman. By the educated he is from an ancient nation that has a glorious past but is at present 'unable to govern herself,' 'run by Reds,' 'disturbed by school boys' and terrorized by Turks and bandits. Some good Christians sincerely rejoice at seeing another 'heathen saved,' while many sociable hostesses remark repeatedly about the good English he speaks, Chinese embroidery and silks, and the proverbial honesty of her laundryman...
...after page of racism and cruelty leaves you feeling in need of a shower. Yet Orwell never thought that the evil of imperialism resided solely in its exploitation of "natives." He was just as interested in its corrosive effect on those who claimed to bring civilization to the unlettered heathen. Imperialism, says a British timber merchant in Burmese Days, speaking to an Indian doctor who admires Western modernity, "corrupts us in ways you can't imagine. There's an everlasting sense of being a sneak and a liar that torments...
...which, to many of those who had to deal with him, made him a royal pain. The British Prime Minister thought the President behaved like a heathen come to rescue the missionaries. The French Prime Minister, exasperated by the President's airs, said that talking to him was like talking to Jesus Christ. Europeans found the President ignorant; he was, said the leading public intellectual of the time, not just "ill-informed" but "slow and unadaptable." The central problem, this observer believed, was that the President's "thought and his temperament were essentially theological not intellectual, with all the strength...
Best of all though, Bowie is rediscovering with Visconti the essentials that made his early albums so extraordinary - not the clothes, rocket ships or shifting personas but the musical craft. On Heathen you can hear again sublime, escalating arrangements, a voice in the finest fettle of his career and, on the best songs, much of the old melancholy for life in a scary universe. The pair plan to return to the studio in the next few months. For now, here's the sound. We await the vision...