Word: squalidity
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...demand for exposed intimacies is easier to understand than the supply. The public hunger for spilled beans is just more of the craving for news, the yen to be titillated, touched or amused by the foibles and agonies of others. Squalid and sleazy tales may reinforce the smug superiority of the righteous or provide perverse comfort for the miscreant. But Americans of all stripes have al ways had, though not uniquely, what University of Chicago Law Professor Philip Kurland calls a "public commitment to voyeurism." Still, why is the voyeuristic hunger suddenly being so abundantly pandered...
Peter Benchley has adapted his soft core sadomasochistic novel, which offers an explanation for all those ships that supposedly disappear in the Bermuda Triangle. He suggests that on one of the out islands is an entirely unmerry band of buccaneers, living by a squalid code unchanged since their ancestors washed up there a couple of centuries ago. It is they who come out of the night to rob and murder unsuspecting voyagers, then sink their ships to conceal the evidence of piracy. Michael Caine plays a reporter who is investigating the Triangle. On a fishing trip...
...strife-torn Karamoja province of northeastern Uganda, relief workers wake every morning to find the corpses of malnourished children deposited on their doorsteps. In the Horn of Africa, more than 1.7 million refugees from the unresolved conflicts in Ethiopia's Eritrea, Tigre and Ogaden areas swelter in squalid relief camps, where thousands have already died from malnutrition and a host of hunger-related diseases...
...standing offer of a diversionary trip to the Triton Hotel in Havana. A Castro showpiece, the 22-story facility was turned into a luxury stockade for exiles willing to pay $44 a night. Guests were forbidden even to visit the oceanfront, and the crowded lobby became as squalid and confused a bedlam as the harbor was. Exiles lined up twelve deep to call loved ones in Havana over wall phones. Elevators broke down, and fistfights broke out. One Miami sales executive, clutching $8,000 in cash, patrolled the corridors seeking a boat to take the eight members of his family...
Their popular image in the West is that of a throng of terrorists and refugees. Some of them indeed are that: there are perhaps 47,000 commandos under arms, and more than 650,000 people living in squalid, overcrowded camps scattered across the Middle East. But this community also includes artists and poets, builders and bureaucrats, doctors and teachers. Their industry and zeal for learning (20 out of every 1,000 are in a college or university somewhere) have earned them the sobriquet "the Jews of the Arab world...