Word: squalidness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...British ships that ferried white convicts to colonize Australia in January 1788. The Europeans ignored the yells, and the Aborigines have suffered from negligence ever since. Now comprising only 1% of Australia's population of 16 million, the Aborigines have become a forgotten and impoverished minority, relegated to the squalid fringes of rural towns and shabby city suburbs of a continent that once was theirs alone. "We are a captive people," says Paul Coe, an Aboriginal leader. "We are a managed people...
...consensus and compromise become hopelessly unsettled in the face of single-minded zeal. The tendency is then to mistake it for irrationality. Ronald Reagan once famously referred to a group of regimes that defy the rules of international conduct as the "strangest collection of misfits, Looney Tunes and squalid criminals since the advent of the Third Reich." Less than two years later it was discovered that Reagan not only had dealt with these Looney Tunes but, in the words of his former chief of staff, had been snookered by them...
...Brits are going to catch with that one is a few harmless former spies eking out their pensions with ripping yarns about the bad old days in MI5. No, what they need over there is an Unofficial Secrets Act -- something that will stop the English underclass from converting squalid youthful memories into rude, shrewd, occasionally lewd movies of the kind that have lately been jostling away at one another -- and at our innocent colonial funny bones. As a group they form a kind of Disasterpiece Theater, more blithely brutal than typically British, and likely to prove ruinous to the national...
...squalid as the garages may be, the truly dispiriting news is that things could be worse. As Lawyer Lee puts it, "It is deplorable that you should have to live without basic human services. But it's a helluva lot better than being on the street...
Overall, Irangate disappoints, despite production costs of at least $40 million. No matter how big the budget, a B-grade actor is still just that. Let's hope this squalid drama closes soon...