Word: babbittism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Whistler v. Picasso. "Perhaps," says Viereck, "every 20 years, the eternal Babbitt dons a new name and a new mask." Old George Babbitt would speak smugly of "boosting and flag-waving and hating slackers and reds, and hating such longhair stuff as culture." Young Gaylord just as smugly pretends to revel in art and culture, thinks "nothing more wonderful than defying middle-class conventions." And his wife "can't stand those barbaric middle-class businessmen...
...Where Babbitt Senior would have used a lithograph of Whistler's Mother to cover up that hole in the wallpaper, Babbitt Junior would, of course, use a Picasso." Where the older Babbitt hashed over baseball and real-estate prices at his Booster Club luncheons, the new Babbitt talks knowingly (" 'knowing' is the word") about The New Yorker, sex and existentialism in an "adequate little French restaurant in the East Fifties." Where the old Babbitt merely hated art, the new Babbitt "hugs it to death...
Indeed, says Poet Viereck, "the essence of all Babbittry, senior or junior, is stereotypes . . . You can always spot [the new Babbitt] by the phrases he uses, by his enlightened, forward-looking attitude toward everything, in life or art or politics; and even more by his awareness of how enlightened and forward-looking he is and by the satisfaction that such awareness gives him . . ." But "nobody laughs at Babbitt Junior's ideas. That's because they're always so liberal and avant-garde...
...century of the common man means a century of sterile and tyrannic philistinism, whether it be a philistinism of right or of left, of Colonel Blimp or of Comrade Blimp. A century that returns to the humanist ideal of the individual man must hold equally aloof from George Babbitt and Gaylord Babbitt...
...confused with Harvard's late, famed humanist, Irving Babbitt...