Word: squalor
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...dreams up a future world in which the only sophisticated technology belongs to the pharmaceutical industry. Where Memoirs Found in a Bathtub enthralls the reader in the narrator's desperately futile search for a purpose, The Futurological Congress sweeps along on Lem's wild imagination. The people live in squalor while they unknowingly take hallucinogens that make them believe they live in the best-of-all-possible-worlds people once believed science would someday provide. The Cyberiad, a collection of short stories, likewise offers tales of how science, once thought so omnipotent, gets caught embarassingly powerless, like a movie star...
...paranoid state of mind. The dictator, known as "the general," has ruled for 100 years. He begins as a popular, benevolent figure. As his power overripens and corrupts, he sells his country's coastal waters, murders his enemies and finally withdraws to his palace to live in regal squalor with his concubines. He still keeps up with public sentiment, however -by reading the graffiti on the walls of his servants' outhouses...
...political host for the convention, the New York State Democratic Party, recently contributed some minor squalor to the air. The state chairman was indicted on charges of selling a judgeship and tampering with evidence. Yet it was typical of the new unity of the party that the New York Democrats, so prominent a force in years past, are binding together with others in the old Democratic coalition across the country-labor, minorities and so on. The prospect of victory, the scent of Republican blood, has been a powerful party healer...
...should hear the joke. The new ethnic sitcoms are covered with "Ramon and Sonja," where a typical gypsy family, a cab-driver, two whores and a "faggot" (I'd like a peanut for every time that word is used; I could run for president) live together in disharmony and squalor. Mother whore to father: Our son would never harm a fly. Daughter: Yeah, unless it was open. Really, I've heard bigger yuks in the engineering...
Purists might complain that Hester Street presents an inaccurate picture of New York Jewish ghettoes at the turn of the century. This is true, but immaterial. According to this film, no one lived in squalor, and the worst aspect of the sweatshops was an occasional snide comment from the boss. The photographer Jacob Riis, who depicted the terrible conditions of living in New York's Jewish ghetto at the turn of the century, would have been horrified by the distortion in this film. But rather than a scathing social portrait of the era, Silver has set out to create...