In this New York gangster story about respect we have the customary victim "slain gangland style," which is New York newspaper lingo meaning many bullets in the head and elsewhere. It humanized them a little because it seemed so nutty that these ruthless buccaneers, who might aspire to rank among the all-time greats of rascality, should pine for something so dull, so common, so ordinary as mere respect. "A man of respect" became, courtesy of popular fiction, one of the modifiers which "Godfather" enthusiasts associated with Mafia big shots. "Middle-class respectability" became a mouthful that provoked the disdain of the romantic, ambitious, artistic, sinning and criminal classes, except, as gangster lore has it, those criminals associated with the Mafia. That was always said of it with a slight hint of contempt on the "respectable." Maybe you were nothing special, but you'd made a respectable showing. It meant, well, at least you hadn't disgraced yourself. To get respect you had only to be respectable, and to be respectable was to be dull, ordinary, average, mediocre. They didn't know how to want on the grand, continental, American scale. Until recently, people who wanted respect used to be mildly comic like Rodney Dangerfield, always complaining, "I don't get no respect." The joke was that people who wanted respect wanted so ridiculously little. "He dissed me," a young killer may say of his victim, turning disrespect into a verb after lopping off its last two syllables. Street children, who have taken to murdering each other with insouciance, sometimes do it because they don't get any respect. ‘I must be getting the strength from somewhere,’ she said – that was, the writer concluded, ‘Little short of a miracle.Here's another story about respect, though maybe not, who knows? Half the stories in the news nowadays seem to be about respect, or more accurately, about not getting any respect, which seems to make people's blood boil nowadays, sometimes at murderous intensity. Back home, Dooley showed no improvement and, caring for him, Mary had not slept for two nights. ‘I only hoped it would not get worse.’ A more realistic hope was not to die there – a Lourdes English cemetery was evidence that wasn’t always the case, and the trip led to one death, one broken bone and a case of pneumonia – the grotto waters are chilly. ‘I didn’t hope for a cure,’ said Sunnuck. ‘If God does not find it possible to cure me, I won’t be disappointed,’ said Power, philosophically. Expectations were low among the English pilgrims the canon in charge of the trip described it rather as a moment of ‘spiritual relaxation’. Miracles were vanishingly rare and ratifying the 70 to date was a torturous process, ‘A cure has to be instantaneous, permanent and scientifically inexplicable.’ Anyone claiming to be cured had to return to Lourdes for confirmation they had not relapsed and provide X-rays and medical records.Ĭures that passed this stage were pored over by doctors, priests and theologians before reaching a verdict. ‘I didn’t hope for a cure,’ said one elephantiasis sufferer in her 70s, ‘I only hoped it would not get worse’
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