Word: ragging
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...waxing wrothful on Beatlemania ("They used us as an excuse to go mad, the world did, and then they blamed it on us"). Paul sounds earnest and superficial, like a Tory spokesman, and Ringo is still the ideal, unflappable pub mate. Even the grating last years, when Paul would rag George about his guitar playing, or sneak in to redub Ringo's drum parts, are events to look back on in sorrow, not anger. From the grave, Lennon has to give perspective to the breakup: "It was a slow death...
...guess that few families gather round the piano to sing of the invasions of Grenada and Panama. Vietnam is pretty much an angry face-off between Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler (The Ballad of the Green Berets) and Country Joe & the Fish (I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag). The Korean War has a memorial now, but still no memorable songs. It's as if, after World War II, Americans decided that internationally sanctioned slaughter was no longer something to sing about...
...deeds of three men in their early 40s who have not yet learned that they are out-and-out psychopaths. Pete Bondurant is a former Los Angeles County deputy sheriff who now works for Howard Hughes; Pete's duties include overseeing the staffing of Hush-Hush, a scandal rag Hughes has bought for titillation and political smears, plus procuring drugs for and keeping process servers away from his billionaire boss. One day Teamsters head Jimmy Hoffa, who is being hounded by the Senate's McClellan committee and chief counsel Robert Kennedy, calls to offer Pete $10,000 to kill...
...fabled American innocence is all shuck and jive? To underscore his thesis, Ellroy uses spurts of unimaginable violence the way other writers deploy commas and periods: "Sal burned a man to death with a blowtorch. The man's wife came home unexpectedly. Sal shoved a gasoline-soaked rag in her mouth and ignited it. He said she died shooting flames like a dragon...
...cocky 11-year-olds put another group of cocky 11-year-olds in its place. This is especially satisfying at games like ours at Wellesley last year. The immaculately groomed Wellesley players, in their perfectly pressed white (of course) uniforms, came out talking a big game against our rag-tag, culturally and ethnically diverse Cambridge team, peppering their trash talk with racial epithets and words like "slum kids." That didn't last long as our "slum kids" handed them their first loss of the season, a shut-out, and went on to beat them again to clinch the league championship...