Word: squalidly
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...Comedian John Belushi's death last March, sensationalist headline followed sensationalist headline. Finally, it seemed, all the ugly details were out. The dissolute star had died from an injected overdose of heroin and cocaine-a "speedball."* Public interest wandered on to more seemly news. But now comes a squalid epilogue: Cathy Smith, 35, a sorry hanger-on who was apparently the last person to see Belushi alive, has claimed that she gave him numerous drug injections, including the fatal one. Smith, a Canadian, is in Toronto, and she has not been charged with any crime. Still, the police...
...refuge from the bombing. Four hundred refugees made their way into the abandoned Concorde Theater, where they slept on the concrete floor without blankets. There was no milk for their children, though the Red Cross had provided some canned food. Said a 90-year-old woman, gesturing at her squalid surroundings: "I am a Palestinian and look at what Palestinians are today-nothing but rubbish." Mustafa Kamal, 37, a baker from Damur, came to the theater with his five children. "As soon as the first bombs dropped, I knew we had to leave," he said. "But for the first time...
...returning home afer visiting our son who is a freshman at Harvard. While visiting his dorm I had occasion to use the women's rest room and was appalled by the squalid, if not filthy, condition of the facilities. The sinks were filled with hair and dried up toothpaste--there were empty plastic shampoo bottles etc, strewn on the floor. The showers seemed lined with scum. Were I a woman student at Harvard, I could not endure the daily assault on my sensibilities...
...Abandoned" seems a little strong to describe what we have done to excellence. But of course a note of elegy always haunts discussions of excellence and quality. It is human nature to imagine that our present reality is squalid, diminished, an ignominious comedown from better days when household appliances lasted and workers worked, and manners were exquisite and marriages endured, and wars were just, and honor mattered, and you could buy a decent tomato. The lament for vanished standards is an old art form: besieged gentility cringes, indignant and vulnerable, full of memories, before a present that behaves like Stanley...
...more conventional images of the landscape abound, too, in Shapiro's description of roadside America. By the time he finishes his trek, we have seen quite enough "green rolling land and pure white houses," to make us long for the squalid city at the end of the line. We have been innundated with "the whine and hiss of traffic" and have breathed so much of the thin mountain air that gives "the sky an extra vibrant richness" that we are gasping for oxygen. The book, like the journey, has its grueling stretches...