Word: vermin
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Some, such as smallpox, malaria and measles, proved effective biological-warfare weapons, ravaging the Indians, who had no immunity against them. But most of the disease-causing microbes of the Old World took readily to the fertile soil of the New World, and so did the insects and vermin that carry them. The result: for fully three centuries, North America was scourged by deadly epidemics...
Doctors would scarcely touch them (many still refuse to treat them), and the law looked upon them as human vermin who had to be swept off the streets and thrown into drunk tanks. Old attitudes still persist, but within the past five years there has been a remarkable change in prognosis. No miracle cure, no equivalent of the Salk vaccine is in sight for the alcoholic, and none is ever likely to be found; but for every one of the many alcoholisms there is at least one treatment or combination of treatments that offers a good chance of cure...
...Prime Minister, in the course of their 26-year feud, called Bevan a "squalid nuisance" and later "Minister of Disease.") In one of the worst gaffes of his career, Bevan denounced Conservatives-presumably, all 8,093,858 Britons who had voted the Tory ticket in 1945-as "lower than vermin." Nor were his own leaders spared Nye's spiced tongue. He thought of his Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, as a Mirabeau and an archmediocrity. He called the humane and thoughtful Hugh Gaitskell, Attlee's successor as party leader, a "desiccated calculating machine." Nye was, as Michael Foot amply...
...most laudable quality was his unwavering loyalty to his political (and non-political) cronies. But as the recent White House shake-up has shown, even this unfailing loyalty is no longer sacrosanct. When Nixon's White House gestapo could no longer cover up for itself, der fuehrer exterminated the vermin...
When Steinberg departs from religious motifs, his humor deals with the psychology, sociology and surrealism of modern life. As one of his show's features he portrays an "existential psychiatrist" whose therapeutic sallies are interrupted by his own compulsive shrieking at vermin only...