Word: pimp
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...gleaned material for his novels. Dance and dancers represented Celine's ideal of beauty, and McCarthy notes that this was, "ironically, fostered by the popular variety shows of wartime London." But his wandering in such milieus provided him with an even broader spectrum of sordid images: a savvy pimp initiated him into Soho's brothels; he was struck by the loneliness and humiliation of urban life in New York; the inhumanity of Detroit's factories, which he saw as a model for Europe, alarmed him. These bleak experiences reinforced his conviction that the Western world was collapsing and goaded...
...order, but he leaves the governing to Angelo, a celebrated Puritan played like a young Robespierre by John Cazale. Angelo believes in absolute justice but soon declines into lechery and official murder. Meanwhile the city fathers can't even clear the streets of prostitutes. A black pimp, brilliantly played in high camp by Howard Rollins Jr., asks, "Does your worship mean to gold and splay all the youth of the city?" The production wisely lets such contemporary resonances ring for themselves. The cast concentrates on turning quirks of plot into confrontations of flesh and blood...
...good stories. He traces the life of Willis Reed from cotton-picking in Mississippi to knee operations in the NBA; Jerry Lucas from Phi Beta Kappa and stardom to bankruptcy; Earl Monroe from street fighting in Philadelphia to racial harrassment in New York; and Walt Frazier from a defunct pimp father to a Rolls Royce and the clothes his father would envy. Like Bradley, they are all past their peaks: not necessarily their peaks of efficiency for a pro team, but for their individual dreams of fulfillment. The pervading note is failure. It carries into the more impersonal analyses...
Imprisonment traps the prostitute further by forcing her to be dependent on her pimp for protection and bail money. Once she is released, a permanent police record will prevent her from finding a "legitimate" job--thus forcing her back to the red-light district. The so-called "villain" is thus a victim--of pimps and policemen, graft and payoffs, unpunished clients and selectively-enforced laws--not to mention society's censure. Not only does the criminalization of prostitution destroy a hooker's respect for herself; it also erodes respect for the law and for the hypocritical law-enforcing...
COYOTE does not support legalization; from the organization's perspective, that alternative simply pulls the prostitute from one trap and lands her in another. "We don't want it ghetto-ized or regulated," St. James says. The government then becomes the most powerful pimp of all; as St. James told a squirming group of attorneys at the American Bar Association convention in 1974, "Really, who wants Ronald Reagan as a pimp...