Word: bleakness
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...great Fourth of July birthday party will not dwell on the ugly side of American freedom (the founders reserving freedom pretty much for white male property owners and countenancing the enslavement of blacks, for example). Nor will the star-burst rhetoric discuss the heartlessness of much American freedom, the bleak lives of those who cannot compete. Freedom has a lot of Charles Darwin's logic prowling around in it, hungry for the weaker animals. Says Economist William H. Branson: "What we've seen since 1981 is the difficulty people have if they lose. They shoot themselves. I was talking...
Some of his entries are speculative: Ophelia may have been the Katharine Hamlet who drowned in the Avon river in 1579. But other cases are beyond argument. Harold Skimpole, the "damaged young man . . . who had undergone some unique process of depreciation" in Bleak House, was the poet Leigh Hunt. A boasting letter from Charles Dickens is exhibit A: "The likeness is astonishing. I don't think it could be more like (Hunt) himself." Dickens tempered his Victorian portrait with humor, but George Eliot was made of sterner stuff. Apologizing to a clergyman who had recognized an unflattering likeness in Scenes...
...refugee problem, once bad enough, has grown worse than anyone would have imagined. O'Brien, a former member of the Irish parliament and ex- editor in chief of the Observer of London, now suggests that a solution to Middle East anguish may not even be possible. That so bleak a view is the basis for so enlightening a book can be attributed to the author's capabilities as a historian, journalist and political analyst, not to mention storyteller...
Still, the scene isn't as bleak as you implied. The House and Senate bills must be reconciled, and the NRA must slog through many more negotiations before it is close to its goal. Handgun control groups, championed by Sara Brady, wife of wounded Reagan aid Jim Brady, are still in the fight...
...last week for a 100-man posse in three states. The searchers were engaged in an all too familiar chore: hunting down Claude Dallas, 36, a self-styled "mountain man" who cold-bloodedly killed two game wardens in January 1981. After the slayings, Dallas eluded similar posses in the bleak, high desert country near the Oregon-Idaho-Nevada border for 16 months before he was wounded and caught in April 1982. On Easter Sunday, Dallas cut his way through two fences at the Idaho State Correctional Institution near Boise and vanished once again in his former haunts...