Word: grueling
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...view of mass culture. To him the TV set was both America's anus and its oracle. He was a history artist, working in a real-things-in-the-real-world vernacular that was, by turns, scabrous, brazenly rhetorical and morally obsessed. Compared with the thin, overconceptualized gruel that most political art in postmodern America has become--the stuff the Whitney normally favors--Kienholz was red meat all the way. Which doesn't mean that his output was uniformly good. An item like The Ozymandias Parade, 30 ft. long and including hundreds of figures, from life-size horses to tiny...
...offers earned-income tax credits for the poor but makes up for this leftish move with a surfeit of new tax breaks for business. It's an attempt, in other words, to mix L.B.J., Reagan and Ross Perot -- which is why it comes out as such a flavorless gruel...
...quickly, Somali servers ladle out two large cupfuls of steaming Unimix, a brownish mixture of maize, beans and vegetable oil, for each person. Suddenly, an elderly woman rushes forward, inadvertently knocking the steaming ration from a small girl's wizened hands. The child howls in pain and anger: the gruel is scalding hot (several other children display peeling scars from previous burns), but far worse, the day's only meal is gone. After filling their pots, the refugees file through the gate -- they are not permitted to eat in the compound -- and settle down in side streets or dusty clearings...
Noon. As the gruel is doled out, cooks keep the six vats brewing, boiling dense brown river water to purge at least some of the bacteria, then stirring in the Unimix with wooden poles. One cook estimates that it will take 80 vats to feed everyone here this day. At least, he says, there is enough food. Two weeks before, inadequate supplies stirred the crowd into a frenzy. Mothers tore pots from starving children to feed their own. "It was terrible," recalls Dr. Ayub Sheik Yeron, the UNICEF representative who set up this feeding center last month. "When people have...
...after walking for three days and two nights to reach this place from their home village 31 miles away. A nurse slips intravenous tubes into barely visible veins and covers each man with a gray blanket. With stomachs too cramped to tolerate food, the men ignore the cans of gruel placed at their side. The nurse predicts that neither will survive to evening...