Word: sordid
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Murder, kidnaping, hired guns, fraud, embezzlement, rake-offs, power struggles-sounds like gangland crime, Chicago-style. But according to accounts of a current union scandal, those are also the standard ingredients of the oil business, Mexican-style. The sordid revelations are the latest, and most titillating, evidence of the widespread corruption that flourished under President Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado's predecessor, José López Portillo. Last week Senator Ramón Martínez Martín, a former leader of the teachers' union, called for a complete investigation of the allegations of wrongdoing...
...shock and disappointment after another. If our elected representatives in Washington are not raising their pay in devious ways, they are involved in sordid sexual adventures. Now we learn that they are living the life Riley never aspired to, traveling the world over at the taxpayers' expense [Sept. 5], with no legitimate end in view. Is it any wonder that Senators and Congressmen are viewed by the U.S. public as less trustworthy than used-car salesmen...
There have been long periods of neglect punctuated by sporadic intervention. Generally, North Americans have preferred to look in other directions, particularly East and West, toward old friends and big enemies. The troubles of Central America have seemed sordid and insoluble, uninviting and even unworthy of American ministration; the peoples and cultures there have remained surprisingly alien, given their proximity...
...rape, torture, intimidation, theft, vigilante justice, and enforced conscription of children which the PLO had practiced during its seven year occupation of Lebanon, all of which rendered the Lebanese government impotent? Is that not a most blatant violation of sovereignty? He cannot bring himself to mention it, but this sordid history has been documented through interviews by David Shipler of the Times, among many others...
...itself ugly, one might add, and this fact strikes home in Time Stands Still, a new Hungarian film directed by Peter Gothar. Set mostly in a high school in Hungary after the 1956 rebellion, Time Stands Still is mercilessly unvarying. Gloomy blue lighting, harsh, barking voices, and interminable sordid scenes--such as the pornographic picture postcards the director insists on showing--merge in a powerful social description of the dreariness of life under a repressive Communist government. The very factors that give the movie its power as a piece of social commentary, though, conspire to make it a depressing aesthetic...