Word: squalidity
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...cost of living seems as much on people's minds as anything in the Koran. A well-paid government worker makes about $100 a month, but that is less than the monthly rent of a squalid flat in Tehran. Many men have at least two jobs, and working-class Iranians have taken to muttering that "life was better under the Shah...
...been weakened by his defeat in the gulf war, but, explains a European spokesman for the Kurdish Front in Paris, "this is the very first time that the plight of the Kurds has been internationalized." The minority leaders are also desperate to bring their people home, down from their squalid border shelters where they are perishing by the hundreds every day. If a shaky truce is the price, so be it. The Kurdish chieftains feel especially responsible for ending the misery of the exodus since they helped cause it by urging their people to rise up against Saddam in March...
...Salonga) -- the narrative fuses a crude soap-opera plot with subtle satire of relations between capitalism and the Third World. Big in cast (45), emotion and physical sweep, the story ranges from the neon vice bars of Saigon and Bangkok to the red- bannered propaganda parades and squalid re-education camps of the Hanoi regime. It embraces chaste Asian weddings and bawdy Yankee beauty contests, a crooning anthem to a glistening American automobile and an austere hymn to a mammoth statue of Ho Chi Minh...
...makan: the Arabic language is capable of magical effects. On a squalid Cairo street early on a cold, foul day, people greet each other with small bouquets of words: "Morning of blessings! Morning of light!" They have conjured a moment, and smiled, and passed, and then, poof! they are back on a miserable street among the pariah dogs. If people are poor and live in the desert, language may be their richest possession: Why not? It opens miraculously onto other worlds. The Koran, with its bursts of sonority and light, describes a paradise that has everything the desert does...
Strange: we know that plagiarism may be fatal to reputation. But it is seldom so savage that it actually kills the writer. Plagiarism is usually too squalid and minor to take a part in tragedy; maybe that was the suicide's true shame, the grubbiness. Plagiarism proclaims no majestic flaw of character but a trait, pathetic, that makes you turn aside in embarrassment. It belongs to the same rundown neighborhood as obscene phone calls or shoplifting...