Word: causticity
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Fran Lebowitz, who made her mark as a caustic social critic with Metropolitan Life (1978), also feels that things are getting worse rather than better. "I don't think people have manners," she says. "I don't think people teach their children manners. I think boorishness is the order of the day. There has been a return to convention, but that's all nostalgia. It's just fear, and fear isn't the same thing as manners...
...somebody crack up in flames." Trivial mistakes get blown out of all proportion. Harking back to some celebrated ones from past debates, Kansas Senator Robert Dole, the admitted loser of a TV match against Walter Mondale in 1976 when they were opposing candidates for Vice President, offers a caustic list of no-nos for debaters: "Don't quote your kids. They may be more informed ... Don't perspire. You might not believe it, but millions of people will be watching your upper...
...features a 17-year-old, Guy Bennett, very much like the young Guy Burgess. Prinked up in Oscar Wilde frippery, gaily mocking the prefects' hypocritical rites of passage, standing defiantly outside this class system, Bennett is a sexual subversive. By play's end, encouraged by a caustic Marxist classmate, Guy is ready to become a political subversive as well. Traitor to his gender, traitor to his country. Why bloody...
...happened to the billions of dollars his country borrowed in the late '70s. Says he: "The foreign debt's most irritating feature for the Argentines is that the money was not converted into the expansion of the economy and the creation of capital. Quite the contrary." That caustic observation could apply to nearly every Latin American country. Although their debt load has quadrupled since 1973 to $350 billion, the borrowers have tragically little to show...
...conservative Democrat: "Jesse Jackson is a black George Wallace-a Rodney Dangerfield. He wants respect. It's a scream for attention. He has no real program. He doesn't know what he's doing." In private, one of Jackson's Democratic rivals is almost as caustic. "There's still one speech Jackson hasn't given yet," he says. "We still haven't seen his agenda...