This bumbling effort to dumb down a smart country indicates the special combination of desperation and incompetence that has become the signature of the Orban regime.
The awkward, bulgy furnishings allude to the feverish pace of technology, and the bumbling effort we normals endure to keep up, only to be eternally one step behind.
Some of the chapters are small, comic essays chronicling a city dweller's bumbling efforts to master the rudiments of country living: "Green Acres" meets "A Year in Provence".
But it would be a mistake to take it as in any meaningful sense radical, just as it would be a mistake to see the bumbling efforts of Horowitz and his epigones to get a few more Ayn Rand groupies campus sinecures as any serious threat to freedom of thought.
As for Martin himself, he evolves from a callow young man, likable in his bumbling efforts to excel, into an openly ambitious, even opportunistic fellow who clearly tries the patience of just about everyone, including the author.
In "Nightmover" (1995), Mr. Wise wrote about the CIA's bumbling efforts to unearth a mole who turned out to be CIA officer Aldrich Ames.
After interrupting his career to serve in the army during the war, he played multiple characters in "Much Binding in the Marsh," a long-running 1950's comedy series about the bumbling efforts of the Royal Air Force at a remote World War II air station.
The fact that insurgents now control great swaths of the country virtually unchallenged tells us the people have been lost, partially due to the occupiers' bumbling efforts.
His BUSH'S LAW: The Remaking of American Justice (Anchor, $16), describes some of the human stories behind administration excesses — including those of several of the 2,700 men locked up after 9/11 and that of Brandon Mayfield, the lawyer falsely linked to the 2004 Madrid train bombings by a bumbling F.B.I. — as well as Nixonian efforts to retaliate against him.
After an unsuccessful effort to buy back his computer business from a bumbling new owner, Gores became inspired to buy broken companies from larger outfits and fix them.
