The disintegration of family is acted out in violent peer relations, festering from generation to generation.
The obvious question, asked by skeptics and admirers alike, is how much a Cyril Ramaphosa can do to fix a system that is festering from top to bottom.
Still festering from a civil war in 1899 that stripped the executive and legislative branches from Sucre and moved them to La Paz, leaving only the highest courts based here, this city is pressing ahead with a campaign to become Bolivia's full-fledged capital again.
Horsfield's depiction of yearning, working-class characters festering from a life on the dole, a life where soccer is the only activity to stir the imagination, is, of course, resonant here as well.
If he does, he may be in for a rude awakening, because when the passion cools down he'll be faced with the pain and reality of his own loneliness and emptiness that festers from his unhealed father wound.
This newspaper continues to urge Mr Obama to engage actively with the outside world, for the reason that America is indispensable when it comes to resolving some issues that cannot be safely left to fester forever, from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the Iranian nuclear crisis.
But until we can sequence the fester locus from other Botryllus species, this remains speculation.
As they travel alone together for the first time in eight years of childless marriage, their festering estrangement, from each other and from their comfortable way of life, bursts into open conflict.
While that festers, players from a multitude of nations who earn their living with English clubs were asked to take part in a pre-match show of unity.
"The odds of repeating another Afghanistan or Iraq — invading, pacifying, and administering a large third-world country — may be low," Mr. Gates said, but the Army and the rest of the government must focus on capabilities that can "prevent festering problems from growing into full-blown crises which require costly — and controversial — large-scale American military intervention".
