Word: squalor
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...state of Arkansas executed a woebegone, deeply depressed mother who had killed her children, I wrote that I had changed my view of the death penalty. While I had once favored it in certain cases, I had decided that capital punishment had lost its meaning amid the general moral squalor and should be abolished altogether...
There is an ongoing struggle in people between the country and the city--between ideas and feelings associated with success, ambition, excitement, the procession of multitudes, as well as with crime and squalor, and those that tend toward an appreciation of serene majesty, passivity, mystery, solitude, pastoral virtues and a different kind of wildness. Both worlds are beautiful--city lamps on a winter night are no less attractive than a swaying kelp forest. The trouble is that nature usually loses in this tug-of-war, in part because it cannot compete in modern terms. Nature is undemocratic; in the wilds...
That is to say, it's a large, open, blue-lit space where dozens of young men, operating at the top of their lungs, sell disreputable stocks to people who mostly can't afford them. Phony pharmaceuticals are particular favorites, which compounds the moral squalor of the operation. In their off-hours the young hustlers watch Glengarry Glen Ross to learn the tricks of their trade and Wall Street to justify it. But they don't really need audio-visual education. Not when they have Jim Young so close at hand. He's their recruiter, mentor, goad and ideal...