Word: hopelessness
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...mind," he says, "that in this country people watch the conversation." To David Halberstam (The Best and the Brightest), spreading the word is like being a political candidate. Says he: "I call it the Nixonization of self. You turn yourself into a human cassette." There is also the nearly hopeless task of trying to explain an idea or complex subject without commercial interruption. South Viet Nam's former Premier Nguyen Cao Ky was on a Midwestern show panel when the host finally turned to him and, asking about the war in Viet Nam, said: "We still have a minute...
...insist the case is not hopeless. Slight drafts of humility, heroically downed at an unguarded moment, can save Vidal still...
...make-an-omelette-without-breaking-eggs dia tribe against social planners, academics in public life and environmentalists. Among his dicta: "Adjustments that take the reward structure too far out of line with contributions produce economic decay . . . An entirely disproportionate share of medical attention goes to the chronic, hopeless ills of the aged at the expense of children and young adults, whose needs would be a much wiser investment of the resources . . . In the real world, limited resources impose choices; in the world of government, everyone can play Let's Pretend...
After merciless stripping-away, the people who were once easily identified as rebels or imperialists are lost. Jimmy Ahmed, the ostensible leader of the black guerrillas, has the mongrel hue of Oriental-black parentage, and his thoughts are a hopeless Freudian melange of perverse lusts and aristocratic tendencies. The revolutionary persona is one that whites fear and Jimmy clings to; "He is carrying the burden of all the suffering people in the world," he writes of himself. But Jimmy's true concerns are homosexual encounters with poor boys, miscegenation and sodomy with upper-class women, and a book...
Naipaul's vision is different from Roche's because it does not legitimize imperialism or attempt to uphold this fragile mess of relations. By the end of the novel Roche's hopeless and fragile position has made him an unwitting accomplice in the murder of his mistress, and his revolutionary opponent is simply a personal opponent. Just because he reduces his paragons of imperialist and guerrilla to such an individualistic level, Naipaul does not dismiss the issue of imperialism. Imperialism has much more subtle effects, Naipaul indicates, than building slums and mansions and creating racist distinctions. Imperialism twists social relations...