Word: miscreants
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...supply. The public hunger for spilled beans is just more of the craving for news, the yen to be titillated, touched or amused by the foibles and agonies of others. Squalid and sleazy tales may reinforce the smug superiority of the righteous or provide perverse comfort for the miscreant. But Americans of all stripes have al ways had, though not uniquely, what University of Chicago Law Professor Philip Kurland calls a "public commitment to voyeurism." Still, why is the voyeuristic hunger suddenly being so abundantly pandered to? Why are so many people revealing personal secrets so casually...
...They imagine that their activity sets them apart from and generally above the rest of humanity. Many come forth sounding as though they have been Zenned and Esalened and Rolfed and Primal Screamed into a state of exaltation hitherto achieved only by beings who talk to birds or turn miscreant wives into salt...
Lightning struck two young men visiting Sequoia National Park in 1975, killing one and damaging the other's nervous system. The tragedy would seem to be an ugly triumph of miscreant weather and bad luck, yet a pending lawsuit against the National Park Service demands "no less than a million" for the disabled survivor and $1,606,645 for his late companion's family. The plaintiffs' argument: the park management negligently failed to warn the victims against standing where lightning might strike. The most amazing thing about the plaintiffs' position is that...
...that both the Post and the Times are making a mountain out of a compost heap. "Let the titans fight it out," sniffs Claude Sitton, editor of the Raleigh News and Observer and a former top Timesman. Miami Herald Executive Editor John McMullan suggested that for the next Watergate miscreant's memoirs, newspapers collude on a single syndication bid, not to exceed...
...Fossey becomes a raging hysteric whenever she encounters a man who she thinks is selling poisonously nonorganic food to her fellow citizens. Serres, convinced that a friend is being driven to suicide by a brother-in-law's financial misdealings, sets out to beat some sense into the miscreant. Naturally he sets upon the wrong man. But no matter. His friend pulls back from self-destruction, but later goes ahead and kills himself anyway...