Word: greeding
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What distinguishes the mentality of the Moscow intelligentsia more than anything else is its greed for awards, prizes, titles: "honored personage . . . laureate . . ." In shameful pursuit of all this, people stand to attention, break off all unapproved friendships, obey all wishes of their superiors and condemn any of their colleagues if the party orders them to do so. I think even the sorriest pre-revolutionary intellectual would refuse to shake hands with the most illustrious one in Moscow today...
...that? The energy crisis glooms over us all, as does the memory of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war that led to the closing of the canal and the rerouting of shipping round Africa. From such a perspective, the rise of the supertanker looks like the kind of triumph of greed and technology over circumstance that customarily passes for progress...
...wonder if Goya's faith in reason endured the Spanish-French war, which ended in 1813. For the question of his time was a gnawing fear that greed and lust might indeed win out over the pull of rational thought. For as Goya's contemporary, Alexander Pope, once asked...
...truth. The heroin is as shackling a possession as the bag of gold in Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale. Indeed, it is worse. Chaucer's three thieves at least thought that the gold was benign. Their catastrophe stemmed from disregarding Christian doctrine: radix malorum est cupiditas (greed is the root of all evil). Without a moral compass, Stone's characters cannot even plead ignorance. The irony that the heroin's value is rooted in its destructiveness does not escape them, but they cannot drop it. Its force has irradiated their world. They know...
...would be unfair to blame Maggie Brenner (Deborah), Ann Varley (Sara), or Michael Gury (Simon) for problems that are so obviously the fault of the script. Lines like "There's love in me, too, enough love to destroy all the greed in the world" are bound to make the most subtle, provocative actor or actress sound silly. Maggie Brenner is effective as the jealous, rapidly aging mother who combats loneliness by occasional flights into a world of make-believe. These moments of fanciful imagination would be hard to sustain were they not presented with delicacy and poise. Sometimes Deborah...