Word: scum
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Instead of friendship, Communist organizations denounced the A.P.'s Spencer Moosa and the U.P.'s Michael Keon for "base insults" to the people of Peiping. Cried one Red committee: "We cannot tolerate frenzied barkings from the scum of the journalistic world...
...sharply drawn characters move through it, their lives intertwined in frantic quests for visas, underground resistance, concentration-camp ordeals, involved political discussions and harried interludes of personal life. With a strong awareness of social gradations, Author Malaquais shows Marseille under the Vichy regime as divided into four groups: the scum, the innocents, the resisters, and the victims...
...Scum. Top specimen of social scum is Adrien de Pontillac, French aristocrat and Vichyite ruler of Marseille. His instincts refined to a delicate dimension of amorality, De Pontillac is one of the lovely brutes who classifies women by zoological categories, and has made indifference to other people into an art of living. When orders come from Vichy to round up all Jews into internment camps, he sets about his task with the precision of an official in an abattoir...
...through a microscope that Dayton's rain got its color from algae (microscopic plants) sucked up by a tornado. Full-sized tornadoes can lift heavy objects (such as signboards) high into the clouds. Even little whirlwinds can vacuum-clean the surface of a pond and deposit its green scum many miles away as discolored rain. Sometimes small fish or frogs are sucked up (and later dropped) with the water...
France, so often a beacon of Western civilization, was sunk in torpor. Silly fads, from existentialism to intimatism, ruffled the scum at the surface of French thought...