Word: raffely
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...must call you on one point in your story and that is the reference, "this (South Carolina) once aristocratic State." Why once? Although the State is full of riff-raff from the North Carolina mountains, poor white trash from Georgia's Tobacco Roads, and its own degenerate offspring of former plantation overseers and Yankee carpet baggers, there is still plenty of Palmetto aristocracy not only in the low country but in the sand hills and up country as well. True, much of the State's aristocracy is run down, but not all by a long shot...
This story of contemporary Sydney is not so much a novel as an interrelated series of portraits; the portraits are not so much human likenesses as translations into brilliant descriptive talk of different types of human problems. Her characters are mostly riff-raff but gloriously magnified and particularized into heroic proportions: Michael, the burnt-out veteran of 32; Baruch, the philosopher of the one-horse printshop; Catherine, the virgin in search of an angel; Chamberlain, the cheerfully hopeless incompetent businessman; Tom Withers, the intelligently rat-minded foreman. Only ordinary character in the book is Joseph, whose very ordinariness lights...
...When Denver finally decided it was tired of Soapy and his kind, he moved on again, this time to Mexico, where he almost sold old Porfirio Díaz the services of a Mexican Foreign Legion, which Soapy, for a good round sum, was to organize among the riff-raff of the border...
...land of liberty (?) any addlepate can vote on an equal basis with his intelligent neighbor (if any), on any and all of the complex problems put before them. The result is that candidates for office are obliged, if they hope to be elected, to appeal to the moronic riff raff with all kinds of fool schemes and promises. . . . T. N. WALTON...
Other charges: 1) Sworn affidavits testified to 8,000 "ghost" voters; 2) gambling and vice are wide open in Kansas City; 3) it is notorious as a hangout for the criminal riff-raff of the Midwest; 4) Desperado Harvey Bailey was arrested while playing on one of the city's best golf courses; 5) Verne Miller had played in a foursome with Police Director E. C. Reppert shortly before he machine-gunned to death four State and Federal officers in Kansas City's Union Station plaza last June;* 6) the $200,000 payoff in the Urschel kidnapping case...