Word: venal
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...view of the gentlemen who fashioned this pop quasi-documentary set to music, Eva was spunky, iron-willed, flagrantly corrupt and a canny mistress of horizontal levitation. With few visible qualms, Evita trades on the voguish temper of the age, which holds that however sleazy, venal or decadent a person is, his or her rise to the top confers chic, even upon moral carrion...
...bitter account of Nixon's first inauguration, he plunged full-fledged into gonzo with "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Deparaved," a hilarious and brutal tale with Thompson in the starring role, English illustrator Ralph Steadman as side-kick, and the liquor-filled aristocracy of Churchill Downs as the venal side of America...
...Student groups working for change today tend to choose their goals more carefully and deliberately than their predecessors of ten years ago; and the chances for serious, violent confrontation are much smaller. Post-Watergate kids grew up with a certain thick-skinned cynicism: a lot of The System is venal, maybe most of it, but it's no use bashing your head against it to make it change...
...Khrushchev "kitchen debate" so that it took place in the model kitchen he was plugging? Wasn't he the nasty White House speechwriter who coined "nattering nabobs of negativism" for Spiro Agnew's attack on the press? His first columns insisted endlessly that Democrats were just as venal and hypocritical as his crowd. Remember his Nixonian attack in doggerel on John Dean, with the refrain, "He's a better man than you are, Gunga Dean"? His pieces were lively, if spiteful. They were sometimes relieved by his love of puns, which he has since learned to check...
...advance for a book about the Italian underworld. The rest is publishing history?and American sociology. Puzo's saga of blood and money, treachery and revenge, class injury and ferocious pride, is one of the most gripping stories in modern popular fiction. Despite its cast of venal monsters and hired killers, The Godfather offered a nostalgic view of the embattled family defending and enriching itself in a ruthless world. Don Corleone even became a Pop father figure?a fascinating inversion of Walter Cronkite?whose distinctively throttled voice conveyed authority, sincerity and trust...