Word: kleptocratic
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...some paintings especially valuable--fame--makes them very difficult to fence on the black market. The Scream, an image nearly everybody knows, is not the kind of thing an unscrupulous buyer could hang in his mansion in plain sight. For that matter, it's hard to imagine some Russian kleptocrat or Colombian drug lord lusting to own anything by the gloomy, sepulchral Munch, not so long as there's an Impressionist landscape to be had instead...
...Indian travel narrative, An Area of Darkness. Many of the details and themes in a long and truly frightening piece, "Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad," he turned into his novel Guerrillas. In "A New King for Congo," his meditation on the late Zairean kleptocrat, President Mobutu, he alludes to Heart of Darkness, comparing Conrad's Kurtz to Mobutu: "Seventy years later, at this bend in the river, something like Conrad's fantasy came to pass. But the man was black, and not white; and he had been maddened not by contact with wilderness and primitivism...
...traffic in Manila by drawing a large crowd on Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, or EDSA, one of the city's main thoroughfares. Next, you recruit a couple of ambitious generals who can enlist the troops and scramble the jets. That's the way two Philippine Presidents were overthrown: kleptocrat Ferdinand Marcos in 1986 and party-loving, mah-jongg crazy Joseph Estrada last January...
They say history repeats, first as tragedy, then as farce. But sometimes it manages both the first time around. Brit Bob Hoskins is a surprisingly apt choice for the Panamanian kleptocrat, whom he plays as a cruel yet pathetic schemer--a lower-class striver who in another life might have become a crooked appliance salesman or sticky-fingered union boss. This playful film teases out the inherent absurdity in the dictator's fall (this was a man besieged by U.S. troops blaring bad pop music to drive him out of his Vatican-embassy refuge) without trivializing his predations...