Word: sordid
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...charges against her are true -- and even her attorney does not seem to dispute her career as a pubescent prostitute -- Fisher's sordid story still would seem to have little to reveal about the norms of her community. Her town of Merrick is a place where success is equated with discipline, exemplified in the manicured lawns and shrubbery of Berkley Lane, where she grew up, and with drive and ambition, epitomized in the way the high school carries grade-point averages out to four decimal places for precision in class rank. This is where the American Dream still works, where...
...nothing wrong with reality that a little artifice couldn't fix, might all be prototypes of a certain kind of Japanese aesthetics (the Japanese Book of Tea reads almost like a pure invention of Wilde's, with its "cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence"). Yet Wilde also saw that silver generalities conceal basic copper truths: "The actual people who live in Japan," he wrote, "are not unlike the general run of English people...
THEN IT GOT really weird. What you might expect to be the usual sordid rightist military junta actually went on to implement, of all things, an APRA progressive reform agenda. The regime courted the Church, sympathized with the landless peasants, stressed social justice and generally confused the life out of every political scientist in the world. In 1980 the brass realized Peruvians were getting sick of them and returned power to--of all people--the befuddled Belaunde...
...based on a true story (Amadeus, Out of Africa, Gandhi). For a while there, it seemed that the Academy had abandoned fiction altogether. And then, they suddenly raised Silence of the Lambs to the level of a Best Picture, in the sweet company of other Best Pictures with less sordid subjects. The Academy also awarded Indian filmmaker Satyavit Ray with an honorary Oscar, showing their somewhat broader vision (although in presenting the award, Audrey Hepburn tagged India with that ancient stereotype "mysterious"). It was a year for fiction, but for outrageous and shocking fiction. It wasn't a year...
Clinton has shamelessly gone on the attack while offering inadequate explanations for his sordid past. Much of his support stems from the belief that only a Southerner can win the South. But American people aren't just looking for a regional candidate--they're looking for meaningful moral and fiscal change in government...