Word: mercilessness
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...only a few hours, but I found what he did in that time quite impressive. The harshness of the mug shot -- the merciless bright light, the stubble on Simpson's face, the cold specificity of the picture -- had been subtly smoothed and shaped into an icon of tragedy. The expression on his face was not merely blank now; it was bottomless. This cover, with the simple, nonjudgmental headline "An American Tragedy," seemed the obvious, right choice...
DIED. ALBERT GOLDMAN, 66, author; of a heart attack; en route from Miami to London. After stints as an English professor at Columbia and a critic for Life magazine, Goldman found his calling as a merciless demythologizer of such pop icons as Lenny Bruce (in 1974's Ladies and Gentlemen -- Lenny Bruce!!), Elvis Presley (Elvis, 1981) and John Lennon (The Lives of John Lennon, 1988). No one would call these biographies "appreciations": the sordid side of his subjects -- from Presley's addictions and gluttony to Lennon's appetite for violence and sex -- fascinated Goldman. All of it was served...
...much and sometimes too carelessly, left many projects half finished and was variously a Trotskyite, a socialist, a pacifist, an anarchist and an aging camp follower of the student lefties of '68. Yet despite his lack of discipline and consistency, many of his essays remain classics: consider his merciless dissection of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible. Reading that often tin-eared update of the beloved King James, Macdonald wrote, "is like walking through an old city that has just been given, if not a saturation bombing, a thorough going-over." As a satirical gadfly, cultural critic and detector...
...middle-class home. Here the mother still mourns the death of her daughter, who would have been Mui's age. The father luxuriates in a torpid guilt. Upstairs Grandma intones prayers for the family dead. Downstairs the couple's three boys make mischief. The youngest taunts Mui with merciless glee; he is just about the only sign of wayward life in this house-and-garden mausoleum...
...those that Bennett lists, no doubt. But they are terribly out of focus. Traditional societies evolve virtues; experience over generations teaches them which virtues are necessary (honor, hospitality and modesty for the Bedouin, for example). A somewhat violent, highly mobile information-television society of short moral attention span, of merciless scrutiny of its role models and of crazed blasts of overstimulation tends to subside into a psychology of grievance and entitlement...