Word: menials
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...petty, bullying tyrant over House committee staff members and more menial employees that Hays became most hated. He has used his Administration Committee, which oversees such mundane but vital matters as Congressmen's parking spaces, travel allowances, restaurant service and custodial help, to satisfy his vindictive whims. Annoyed that elevator operators were sitting when he had to stand, he ordered their jump seats removed. Irked at House barbers, he raised haircut prices and banned tipping. Mad at the press, he temporarily refused to sign pay vouchers for some press-gallery employees. Hays gained extra influence as chairman...
...seems to be the only one who grasps this fact clearly, and it informs his dissatisfaction and frustration with the scheme of being and not being. He sees the heavenly world the way the playwright does--as a fraud. He's an intellectual type, consigned for his shrewdness to menial tasks and thwarted revolutions. He's sort of sympathetic in his weakness; surely he would be happier with his head in the clouds. Instead, he's worse off than we are, with his feet firmly planted under the ground. It might be going a bit too far to call...
...lecture circuit. Ti-Graee Atkinson, 37, is something more. "I'm broke," she announced last week, after receiving her first New York City welfare check. The reason? Those well-paying speaking engagements have apparently gone the way of student sit-ins and antiwar marches. She had applied for menial jobs, too, she noted, "But people say I'm too old or too famous or too hot to handle." Atkinson, who has delivered plenty of barbs to male chauvinists and unmilitant feminists in her time, has a new target: the welfare department. To collect her first $47 semimonthly check...
That is what happens to Carlyle (Dorian Harewood) in Streamers. The locale is a Virginia army camp in 1965. Carlyle is black, and he has been assigned to a company of "untouchables," i.e., men on perpetual KP and other menial duties. He is desperately afraid that he will be shipped off to Viet...
There is a certain kind of urban character who, however lightly we brush against him, instantly leaks the psychopathy of everyday anguish all over us. He is a man working in a menial job that brings him into constant, envious touch with people more fortunate than he, a man enraged by the bad deal life has given him but unable to articulate that rage. Instead, he is given to fantasies ranging from the glumly sexual to the murderously violent. He is, finally, a man of muttered imprecations and sudden, brooding silences; which of these moods is most alarming is hard...