Word: luridly
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...dark days of the cold war, Soviet propaganda was predictably noisy and lurid. During Dictator Joseph Stalin's "Hate America" campaign of the early 1950s, for instance, Kremlin artists depicted U.S. soldiers as hideous, spider-like creatures, armed with spray guns and injection needles, demonically waging germ warfare. But the ad that filled three-quarters of a page in the New York Times last week was far more sophisticated. WHAT HOLDS BACK PROGRESS AT THE GENEVA TALKS? queried the headline. In four columns of dull gray type, paid for by the Soviet embassy in Washington, an editorial reprinted from Pravda...
...Roosevelt while admiring Hitler managed, according to his critics, to capture just about every significant thing that happened in this country--culturally, socially, politically and economically--during the time frame of his obsession. Professor Aaron says the 1,000 or so characters Inman debriefed, so to speak (the more lurid the accounts, the better, Inman felt), "disclose aspects of American life only sporadically touched upon in contemporary fiction." In a way, the diary can be seen as a nonfiction novel. The nut wrought something important...
...other ways, too, the dictatorship is less oppressive. Deng has permitted a popular press to spring up. Hundreds of new publications have appeared all over China; they cannot criticize policy, but they print lurid exposés of prostitution, pornography, corruption and black-marketeering by party officials (indeed, they sometimes seem to report little else). Culturally, Deng in 1983 permitted officials to start a crackdown on writers and artists, in the guise of a campaign against "spiritual pollution," probably as a gesture toward conservatives concerned that the pace of change was too rapid. But Deng speedily announced that the campaign...
...episode involving Chen is worth a pause and exploring, if only to be reminded of the cultural and political gulf between the two countries; to take a reality check on the diplomatic dynamic; and to get a sense of where the relationship is heading. For some, Chen's lurid allegations about kidnapping, a vast system of espionage involving Chinese nationals in Australia, and the harassment of Falun Gong, seem out of kilter with a China making its reputation on the fecundity of its factories and new millionaires. The wonder of China's economic progress has tended to blot out other...
...Bart Simpson would say, that joke is funny for so many reasons. It's also all in the telling, so it plays on comics' need to earn approval through lurid pirouettes of a lunatic imagination. And having spent all its shock value in the setup, it offers a punch line of cheerful poignancy. This family will do anything to be in show...