Word: squalidity
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...afternoons in Johannesburg. At 1 o'clock, the shopkeepers rolled up their shutters, and most of the city's white workers headed for their suburban homes or to tennis courts and golf courses. The city's Negro laborers, in no hurry to get back to their squalid quarters, repaired to the Mai-Mai, a huge, government-run beer hall that serves the only alcoholic drink legally available to South Africa's blacks, a weak brew officially known as Kaffirbeer (which Negroes often spike...
...intelligentsia were so entranced by this play about thieves and harlots. Up to the time John Gay wrote it in 1728, London opera had been the Italianate tableaux of Handel, complicated tales of gods and goddesses, ancient heros, and noble peasants. Gay took contemporary London as his scene, its squalid poor for his supporting players, and a well-born rake turned highwayman as his hero. Whereas Handel had been intrigued by the idea that savages could be as noble as lords and ladies, Gay argued that nobles could be as savage as the lowliest pimp; his characters, though they...
Halfway around the world in Mexico, another of humanity's sorrows was turning to promise. Huddled into a corner of Nayarit state, the squalid hamlet of Tecuala had for years had contact with the outside world only through a dirt mule track. But in 1951 an all-weather road pushed into Tecuala, and the town got a small, 600-kw. generator. Within weeks, the power plant put new life into Tecuala. A modern street-lighting system was installed, a water-pumping system modernized; Tecuala's hospital got refrigerators, fluorescent lighting, a fluoroscope. In short order, the town added...
...Lloyd C. Douglas story the suffering was zoned; it took place only in the very best shruburbs. In the Sartre resartion, Agony Alley is the main drag of an abominably filthy Mexican village. There, stretched flat on the floor boards of a squalid second-class bus, a European traveler (Andre Toffel) is dying of cerebrospinal meningitis. His wife (Michele Morgan) rushes out to look for the local doctor, but all she finds is a wambling wreck (Gerard Philipe) who has not dared to push a pill since his wife died in a childbirth he drunkenly mismanaged...
...Grumble. As expected, some church leaders grumbled about immorality. Laborite Harold Wilson taunted: "Now Britain's strength, freedom and solvency apparently depend on the proceeds from a squalid raffle." The left-wing New Statesman and Nation labeled Macmillan's proposal "the birth of the windfall state." But the august London Times defended the new bond, and so did the Financial Times...