Word: rot
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Moist Gaze. Meantime we have Days. It is a characteristically hefty tome chronicling virtually every day in the life of an admirable West Country schoolmaster-a sort of block off the old Chips. Never mind the subversive rot that Waugh, Orwell and Cyril Connolly wrote about the English public school. Delderfield's Bamfylde is a cozy, character-building place. Pranks are played, faculty rivalries worked out, young minds awakened, while over it all Delderfield nods with the benign and sometimes moist gaze of an Old Boy. There seems to be a streak of self-identification in the author...
...Assassins fits a similar pattern, except now Kazan's subject is the whole United States of America-as a terminal case. Military hardware lies slowly disintegrating in the desert, the law softens and bends, violence flourishes, youths rot their minds with chemicals. This is certainly not the country of Kazan's autobiographical novel America America, the young immigrant's dream and fulfillment. In the new book, a father tells his acidhead son, "If you want to live a big life, get a big cause," and the kid doesn't know what his father is talking about...
...over Brazil were lured with big promises, only to find themselves victims of a kind of grocery slavery. Overextended credit at the company store, accompanied by threats of death from company gunsels, kept the rubber workers toiling vainly to clear their debts. They were usually cheated and left to rot among their isolated stands of dried-up trees while the profits went to Manaus, that rococo Sodom in the middle of the Amazon's vegetable sea. Before the rubber bust, Manaus' theaters starred Pavlova and Bernhardt, and its richest residents sent their shirts to London to be ironed...
...suffering from high unemployment (an estimated 1,000,000 are jobless in the East Central state alone). Most basic services -roads, telephones, water and power -are in chaos and disrepair; the luxurious Ikoyi Hotel outside of Lagos, for instance, is often waterless for days at a time. Goods rot on their way to market because of highway snarls, and according to a recent survey, the chances of completing a telephone call in Lagos are only...
Partly because of these very traditions, however, Powell stands out against the stereotype of the segregationist. When some Virginians were trying to launch a policy of "interposition" against federally enforced integration of schools, Powell denounced the doctrine as "a lot of rot." As chairman of the Richmond public school board, he presided over the successful, disturbance-free integration of the city's schools in 1959. No sooner had he been nominated to the Supreme Court, in fact, than he won the endorsement of Virginia N.A.A.C.P. leaders...