Word: genteelness
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...Saturday night; the cast of American in Purgatory was preparing its closing performance. The Agassiz Theater lies a grassy fifty yards from the Loeb but seems shabby genteel by comparison. the dressing rooms huddle in the basement, ceilinged by exposed pipes that cast members have garnished with crepe paper. The festive one-for-all atmosphere heightened in intensity; in a few hours the only remnant of two months work would be a stack of slides the producer arranges in a small, plastic carousel. "AAAaaah, Ooooh, la-la-la-la-la-ne-ne-ne-t-t-t-;" gregarious gobs gather...
There is nothing Donleavy enjoys more than spoofing the follies of polite society. He has had some time to observe these, having fled the hopelessly declasse shores of New York City, his birthplace, to more genteel echelons in Ireland. His first novel, The Ginger Man, instantly revealed an affection for the upper classes and their dirty linen. In creating Sebastian Dangerfield, dissolute hero and impoverished aristocrat, Donleavy unleashed one of the most charming rogues of twentieth century English literature--suave, jaunty, devilishly...
...carefully constructed guise. "I live and draw a flow of gold," Balthazar B thinks to himself, "from a dead father's reservoir of riches. Behind my own lonely elegance. Where no one will ever again get to know me. And speak less and less." Donleavy has donned that genteel mask in The Unexpurgated Code, and what he would say behind the facade you can only guess...
...Hampshire was past; Massachusetts and Florida were looming ahead in successive weeks. Even as the victory chants in a Manchester hotel broadened his gleaming grin, the boyish-looking candidate took the lectern to talk of the impending challenge by Alabama Governor George Wallace in Florida. Dropping his genteel accent, former Governor Jimmy Carter spoke jokingly in the redneck slang of his rural South, vowing, "And we gon' take 'im!" His traveling Georgia campaign workers whooped with joy. Then Carter, whose Secret Service code name is Dasher, flew off to Boston while most of his exhausted Democratic opponents slept...
...threat as the "tyranny of the majority." He draws a distinction between public opinion and popular opinion, praising the former as something more than the mere "whole of a majority of actual, living voters." Valid democracy is "historic, tradition-anchored and 'corporate'." Sounding like a Prussian Junker, Nisbet, a genteel tenured member of the Columbia faculty, identifies perhaps his greatest fear for the future of his nation: ". . . the aggregate we call the mass or crowd, always oscillating between anarchic and military forms of despotism...