If you're looking for the link between Hemingway's impotent post-war drifters in The Sun Also Rises, the barflies and Tralalas of Last Exit to Brooklyn and the zonked-out kids of Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero, look no further.
The Americans in the novel aren't exemplary: Barnes is impotent, from a war wound; Robert Cohn is creepy in his unrequited love for Brett, Lady Ashley.
Part of the problem is the casting of Jake, the writer and bullfight aficionado left impotent by a war wound who uses wit, charity and, oh yes, booze to adjust to his condition.
The charge that the United States was impotent resonated in those Cold War days.
The result has been paralysis instead of power, leaving Mr. Erdogan an impotent spectator of the civil war on his doorstep.
Adapter and director Phillip Breen finds plenty of that in the story of Constance who finds solace in the arms of Oliver Mellors, the estate gamekeeper, after her husband returns home injured and impotent from the first world war.
They could not give the Americans what they really wanted a cast-iron guarantee that no American could ever be charged before the court for a war crime without rendering the court impotent.
Just at the point when a cohesive response was vital, the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council embarked on a new cold war over Ukraine, thus rendering itself impotent.
Towards the end of the second series, Stevens was required to play a man who had been paralysed and rendered impotent by his activities in the first world war.
Andrew Crawford, in "The Easter Parade," is sexually impotent; perhaps not coincidentally, he was passed over for war service.
