Word: squalidity
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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...
Critic Pritchett concedes that Joyce had humor and "the imagination to turn his squalid people into giants first. No one can say that the characters of Ulysses are trivial in dimension, even though their preoccupations are mean, food-stained, dreary and unelevating. His people are Celtic monsters, encumbered by the squalor of their enormous burden of fleshly life-enormous because it is so detailed-and the dreadful, slow, image-spawning of their literal minds . . . One can see that, in Joyce's imitators, the interior monologue was a blow for democracy, a rather dreary one; the fact that...
...Black Nation. Cursed beyond most corners of Elizabeth's empire with a hellish climate and a poverty that festers through vast acres of its capital city in some of the world's most squalid slums, Nigeria is nevertheless an optimistic and happy land. An all-black nation whose non-African residents number only 16,000, it has no notion of the meaning of apartheid or Jim Crow. Eager for and already well on its way to self-government, Nigeria bears no grudges. "Why should we be anti-British?" Nigerians are likely to answer if queried...