While the real "Sesame Street" kept it positive, dealing only with the effect that having a parent in prison has on a young boy and the protection and friendship the other puppets offer him, Oliver had grimmer ground to cover.
Cemeteries were transformed from grim charnel grounds to earthly Edens, where temple-tombs popped up like mushrooms, and transcendent meetings took place.
One afternoon in April, for a few grim seconds, the ground shook beneath them.
In Ozick's telling, they encounter a postwar city of dark, grim truths: "The ground was scorched, the streets teemed with refugees and these Americans were playing at fleeing!" With a satirical eye, but one that also recognises the great value and luxury of her own country, she writes of "these coddled Californians, with no inkling of endurance.
And while this White House would seem to have a vastly better political ear than the last Bush White House, even a few Republicans were shaken last week when the Bush campaign found itself under attack by firefighters and families of victims of the World Trade Center attack for using grim footage from Ground Zero in Mr. Bush's first political advertisements.
What is on the public record is the imprisonment of 20 -- 40,000 Iraqis in grim conditions on grounds of engaging in "anti-Iraqi activities" -- i.e. planning to attack Americans.
Months later Ms. Anderson would discover drug paraphernalia buried in the ground, like grim exotic plants.
Not surprisingly, a Vietnam-like credibility gap has now arisen between what our government claims to be achieving in Iraq and the grim reality on the ground.
It has also exposed his administration to accusations of a growing credibility gap between optimistic White House pronouncements and the grim realities on the ground.
He is a sheltered young man "who didn't know anybody who was exiled to grim mining towns or ground tree bark into their stew in order to fill their stomachs''; he and his family used to have nothing in common with provincial schoolkids forced to work in the opium fields.
The Football Association, on whose home ground these grim events took place, launched a swift investigation, as will the Metropolitan Police, who have already made 10 arrests.
