Word: shiftlessly
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More interesting than the whodunit part of Fuller's play is the "Who the hell was he?" aspect in which Waters' complex character is explored. Waters has tried to scour himself to whiteness through discipline and excellence. He is a martinet who addresses his recruits as "shiftless lazy niggers" and hounds one guitar-strumming vagabond singer, sweetly played by Larry Riley, to his death. "They ought to work you niggers till your legs fall off," he screams at his charges, meaning "snap to and measure up," the one-line basic English catechism of the U.S. regular Army sergeant...
...ALAND OF SHIFTLESS hobos, of freight train yards and greasy roadside lunch counters; a land of desperate losers, crooked insurance salesmen and small-time racketeers, of empty pockets and broken spirits. That was James M. Cain's America. If for Thomas Wolfe or Jack Kerouac The Road led to freedom, for Cain it was some kind of a prison, a vast, inescapable refuse pile for the hungry and homeless. The characters in Cain's books, most of them drifters and box-car bums, search desperately for a piece of anything to call home. And when they find...
...seems horrible, yet not really surprising when, in Cain's classic Postman, a shiftless drifter named Frank Chambers takes a job with the owner's wife, and with her plots to kill him. Nor is it surprising in Double Indemnity, when Walter Huff, an unsuccessful insurance agent, falls in love with one of his clients' wives, and plots with her to kill her husband...
...Shiftless Schemers. The Japanese bear no grudge against Pinocchio himself, who in Collodi's tale is afflicted with disabilities enough before achieving his dream of becoming a flesh-and-blood boy. Their objections focus on the book's two ne'er-do-wells, the Fox and the Cat, shiftless schemers posing as mendicants who are lame (the Fox) and blind (the Cat), while merrily fleecing the gullible young puppet. By the end of the tale, the Cat is truly sightless and minus a paw, while the Fox does not fare too well either?he ends up thin, almost hairless...
...stumbled onto a lot of shiftless people by the end of the summer; you could say I was more or less one of them: never pausing in a particular place for longer than a day or two, breaking away from friends when I'd barely found them out, too often moving on reluctantly. It was pretty awesome how much company I had: all of us feeling trapped in perpetual transit, even though some of us knew we were slated to come to a standstill, eventually, in this house or on that date...