Word: class
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...rural residents is exclusive to Harvard or to liberals. After all, the similarity of the word "urbane" (meaning "well-bred and courteous") to "urban" is no etymological accident. I'm not even convinced that elitist Harvardians--both liberal and conservative--disdain "rednecks" any more than they disdain the working class in general...
...this insensitivity that allowed Harvardians to evade the Vietnam draft with clean consciences and let the "hill-billies" die in their stead (a point made by James M. Fallows '70 in his brilliant essay "What Did You Did You Do in the Class War, Daddy...
...greatest character is the military academy itself, sustained by patriotic zeal in the '50s, pocked by controversy in the '60s and cheating scandals in the '70s, yielding in the '80s to a new national temper. Today women are admitted, there is a , course in ethics, and the incoming class is treated with unaccustomed humanity. "Demanding but not demeaning" is the cadre's new motto. Only the school prayer goes on as before: "Make us to choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong, and never to be content with a half truth when the whole...
Rick Atkinson's epic of West Point's class of '66 is marked by such piercing incidents. A Washington Post reporter, he begins by following some 600 freshmen, ruddy and damp in their new gray wool uniforms. Loud harassment is the order of the day ("Pull that neck in, mister. You call that bracing?"). It has been this way since Thomas Jefferson founded the academy in 1802, and in the crowd of intimidated cadets the figures tend to blur -- until destiny selects them for service in Viet...
...whose career is derailed by accidents and disfigured by a war he can neither take nor leave. Jack Wheeler is an idealistic Army brat who loses his military faith in the trenches. Postwar, both men have turbulent domestic lives; both resign their commissions, as do nearly 25% of their class. Both are obsessed by the idea of a Viet Nam memorial in Washington. But Wheeler favors the final design; Carhart, a lifelong iconoclast, censures the "black gash of shame and sorrow, hacked into the national visage that is the Mall." George Crocker, the classic warrior-aristocrat, is far removed from...