Word: squalor
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Vonnegut, being a middleman, can't get very far with ideas. He doesn't link up Dresden with any inherent political or social conflicts it symbolizes, implying instead a state of moral squalor necessary for such a catastrophe to have taken place. And his vision is only that of Bill Pilgrim, a stupid if sweethearted protagonist, bumbling between the Ilium upper-middle-class of Vonnegut's present, the Dresden holocaust, and the planet Tralfamadore, where he cavorts with a nubile Hollywood starlet in a fantasy-world designed to protect him from being fatally bound to his depressing earthliness...
...preventing such abuses rests with HUD Secretary George Romney, whose department includes the poorly administered FHA. In an eloquent if self-serving speech, Romney tried to divert attention to the broader problems of the ghetto, noting that bad housing was a result rather than a cause of ghetto squalor...
...thousand decibel dry hump. And Howard Wales' sterile charade delivers: drum solos with all the pulse of a seconal addict; keyboard work with all the sensuousness and imagination of a computer print out; treacly singing; the stage presence of a sloth; and above it all in smug squalor was the ego of Wales, ballooning over the audience with all the magnificence of a slug in heat...
...jeeps, today there are American station wagons, driven by American housewives of USAID employees, often with American children jumping around on the back seat. Driving down the main Boulevard paved with U.S. concrete, in their air-conditioned Ford Country Squire, they seem oblivious to the heat, dust, and squalor surrounding them...
Ferree puts affluence's refuse to remarkable purpose. Four times weekly he climbs into a worn old bus and distributes these goods to the Mexican migrant workers who live in brutalizing squalor on both sides of the Rio Grande. But that only begins his chores. After persistent dunning, drug companies have shipped tons of vitamins and medicines to Harlingen, and Ferree dispenses them in the Mexican towns of Reynosa and Matamoros, where he has established makeshift clinics in abandoned shacks. He ministers to minor ailments himself; with the help of admiring merchants on both sides of the border...