Leaving Casablanca

"The prospects for impoverished, unschooled, unskilled young men the world over have not changed much since 1651, when English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes in The Leviathan termed their lives "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". With the exception of the modern anodyne presented by a readily available and relatively inexpensive supply of hashish, the lives of young Moroccan men in the 1970s as depicted in Abel's LEAVING CASABLANCA matches Hobbes' grim description prediction exactly.