Word: shiftlessness
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...free spirit somehow blooming in a wasteland Western landscape. In the beginning-way back in 1925-a reasonable, ambitious rancher named Gid Frey loves her, but he is not "silly" enough for her taste. His buddy, Cowboy Johnny McCloud, also loves her, but he is too silly-or shiftless-for her. So she marries a real no-count whose fate (he dies a couple of years later) is no matter because before, during and after her marriage, Molly gives separate but equal bedroom time to her two true loves. In the process she bears a son to each of them...
...ambiguities in the law's view of family life become even more ambiguous when the law involves the payment of Government funds. About 62% of welfare recipients are women heads of household and their dependent children. Some politicians have enjoyed scolding these helpless people as shiftless idlers, but despite the law's gesture of protectiveness, a woman alone raising children is scarcely loafing. Nor can she do much better by trying to find work, if work exists. One recent study showed that a mother of three, after training for one category of available Government jobs, would gross only...
...ridiculous. You don't give people dirt to encourage them to work. There's not much incentive in that." On the other side, in the grip of inflation and rising taxes, those who pay the bill complain that too much is being given away to millions who are probably shiftless and lazy. In that view, welfare money means, as Ronald Reagan puts it: "A tax increase next year, the year after and the year after that, and on into the future as far as we can see." Thus the worst thing about the price tag of $14 billion is that...
...times onstage, Jones has, if anything, grown fresher. He does not act the part so much as consume it, then let it shine out of his eyes and resound in his mouth: "If I lets it go too long, then everybody say, now ain't dat one shiftless nigger . . . an' if I chop him down quick, then dey holler dat po' man up dere fightin' a go-rilla!" When white folks watch, Jefferson plays animal or vegetable. The 250-watt Satchmo grin flicks on at will, the massive shoulders shrug at circumstances beyond comprehension. But under...
...puritanism and made it all possible. For more than two centuries, from that subversive puritan Ben Franklin to the wryly theological Charles Schulz, the nation's humorists have operated as a tolerated underground culture. They have conspired to create a fantasy world where good Americans could be as shiftless as Charlie Chaplin's tramp, as cynical as W.C. Fields never-giving-a-sucker-an-even-break, as lecherous as Groucho Marx prowling a bedroom. American humorists, in other words, have kept American puritans sane and alive...