Word: squalor
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...tone is ominous, the guilt pervasive. Prayers are uttered under gray, indifferent skies. No one is quite certain where the atmosphere ends and the characters begin. The place is Greeneland, scene of some 40 books and movies. By now readers should be weary of its squalor and despair. Instead, each year brings more visitors. The reason is Graham Greene's ability to remain, at 78, one of the world's most unpredictable artists. From comedies like May We Borrow Your Husband? to the sheer lunacy of Travels with My Aunt, he has consistently astonished those who thought...
...Blade Runner, an adaptation of Philip K. Dick's 1969 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the here is quite enough: a vision of dark, cramped, urban squalor. This is Los Angeles in the year 2019, when most of the earth's inhabitants have colonized other planets, and only a polyglot refuse heap of humanity remains. Los Angeles is a Japanized nighttown of sleaze and silicon, fetid steam and perpetual rain. This baroque Tomorrowland juggles images from a dozen yesterdays: walk out of the rain and into a 1940s world of overhead fan blades and women...
Watergate is such an elaborate masterpiece of irony (by taping himself, Nixon provided virtually all the evidence that destroyed his presidency) that too many people forget its clearest lesson. The deepest significance of Watergate, the only important meaning to be extracted from all of that wreckage and squalor, penetrates to the innermost American idea. To say, as many Americans did after Watergate, that the "system works" is only partly true: the constitutional system, in this case, with a lot of luck, did work. The important lesson that Watergate established is that no President is above...
Emerson should not be understood too quickly. As William James explained, "Emerson could perceive the full squalor of the individual fact, but he could also see the transfiguration." Emerson had wonderful lines about the fallen world: "It seems as if heaven had sent its insane angels into our world as to an asylum, and here they will break out in their native music and utter at intervals the words they have heard in heaven; then the mad fit returns and they mope and wallow like dogs...
...percent of the population. In the capital city, Port as Prince, the average annual income is $275 a year, in the rural areas the figure falls below $135 a year. The infant mortality rate is 30 percent, and the average Haitian life span is 52 years. Amidst this squalor, Duvalier spent more than $1 million on his 1980 marriage ceremony...