Word: smells
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Hopelessness & Helplessness. Statistics at best can only delineate the bare perimeters of poverty. The sensations of being poor are scarcely comprehensible to the 170 million Americans who are not poor: the hollow-bellied, hand-to-mouth feeling of having no money for tomorrow; the smell of wood smoke that hangs over Southern shantytowns?romantic to the suburbanite, but symptomatic of scant heat and pinchgut rations to the poor; the bags of flour delivered by a well-meaning welfare agency, in a household that has no oven; the pervasive odor of human urine and rat droppings in perennially damp walk...
...American society. Indeed, it is a common fallacy to believe that what is momentarily politically serviceable is ipso facto intellectually virtuous. Even though I understand this viewpoint as held by black nationalists and am indeed compassionate toward it, my intellect rejects it. Like Mary McCarthy, I begin to smell a rat--metaphorically speaking--and feel compelled to dissect...
MARY McCARTHY, the novelist and penetrating critic of the grotesque Vietnam War, has recently remarked in the New York Review of Books that whatever intellectuals do with their skills and cleverness, they should never shy away from doing what they can do best--namely, to smell a rat, metaphorically speaking, and to dissect its nature and character, letting the chips fall where they may. To some extent, this is what I should like to do in my comments on the "Intellectual Validity of the Black Experience...
...camera, in fact, is omnipresent. Plugged into the nation's living rooms, it has created a kind of instant party line. For politicians, exposure on TV is crucial. And the smell of the crowd has led to the roar of the grease paint. Candidates have learned that the important thing is not so much what they say but that they say something that will get them on the evening news. "Our leaders," says Columbia University President Grayson Kirk, "are expected to appear almost on call before the television cameras, to hold innumerable press conferences, and to share their thoughts...
...scalps for $25 apiece, and Davis gets himself captured by these private enterprisers. Their queen is Shelley Winters, a refugee from a fancy house. She nurses her stogie on a brass bed in the covered wagon of the No. 1 Bad Guy (Telly Savalas) and keeps complaining about the smell from the scalps...