Word: merciless
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...bodies or souls," The Marines, in a series of vivid, violent images and startling closeups, follows the grim process of making men of them. Naked torsos are lined up in a sterile examination room like sheep. Barbers briskly shear them. Then come the relentless weeks of screamed orders and merciless reprimands ("Hey, stupid, you shave this morning?" "Get that crummy chin up!"), reaching a crescendo in the savagery of bayonet drill. "Downward slash!" barks the drillmaster. "You know what that means." At that point, the Paris audience invariably gasps...
...life of crushing respectability in an awful welfare-state township, pray to the Virgin to be relieved of their childlessness. Their prayers are answered. But the Madonna in "heir church, a figure carved from Irish Dog oak, is black as ebony; so, too, is their first-born child. This merciless story makes plain that neither inheritance nor adultery with a Jamaican can explain the couple's embarrassingly Negroid blessing. For all its apparent defiance of realism, this kind of Spark fiction-typical of most tales in this collection-has honest intentions: to make vivid the author's conviction...
...scan the men in the TV studio are devoid both of prejudice and of any softening human kindness. For the candidates there is no place to hide, no way of ducking behind a "no comment" or a sonorous platitude. Every quaver of voice, every fleeting grimace, is subject to merciless scrutiny...
Fearless & Merciless. Bobby has had far better luck in his crash program to register new voters. "The Democrats are there," he says, "and if we are going to win this election, we just have to reach them." As director of the program, Jack Kennedy selected his friend, Representative Frank ("Fearless") Thompson Jr., a handsome, hard-driving New Jersey Congressman who matches Bobby's own energy and relentless single-mindedness. Working around the clock and country, Frank Thompson has spent $100,000 on the program, recruiting 200,000 door-to-door canvassers to goad laggard voters into the registration centers...
...wrong hair. His only crime is. he confesses, "the fact that I am alive"-although he explains in a frenzied bout of surrealist logic that he is not exactly responsible for that. Reading his fabulous and farcical misadventures is an experience like being cornered by a compulsive talker whose merciless spate of words first glazes the eye until a thread of rewarding sense emerges from the gabble. In this respect, he is unlike the typical Chaplin figure, whose weapon was silence, but like Chaplin's little fellow, he is a reincarnation of the classic non-hero of Jewish folklore...