Word: moms
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...future importance of bombing and the black-hearted intentions of Hitler's gang, but limited, unfortunately, by the whims of editors to writing minor fiction and articles on fishing. This book represents, then, the eruption of a long repressed critical volcano in which every sacred American institution from Mom down to bingo comes in for a baptism of fire. What distinguishes it from the run-of-the-mill Menckenisms and Peglerisms is a set of sound philosophical premises. The style is pungent and rings all the possible changes on the modern journalistic vocabulary, but behind it all is the conviction...
Generation of Vipers is a raging and sometimes very funny set of lay sermons about the human predicament as examined in terms of "you-your home and kiddies, mom and the loved ones, old Doc Smith and the preacher, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Star-Spangled Banner-in short, the American scene" plus the still uglier clutter backstage. Novelist Wylie's high desire is to save the human race from its own worst enemy-itself. Whether he will succeed where such distinguished predecessors as Christ, Dostoevski and Blake have so far failed is open to question...
...Mom & Cinderella. A good example of Wylie in action is his discussion of the American figments he calls mom and Cinderella. Says he: "Filial duty was recognized by many sorts of civilizations," and filial love and honor have normally been accorded those women who honestly earned it. "But I cannot think, offhand, of any civilization except ours in which an entire division of living men has been used, during wartime, or at any time, to spell out the word 'mom' on a drill field...
...Mom is the inevitable result-and creator-of Cinderella. And the American Cinderella, in fiction and in fact, is a perversion of the original myth. In that story the point was that the Prince found his proper wife in the difficult and lowly circumstances which had made her proper. In the U.S. version "we have enshrined, not the earnest search of the Prince, which is a positive force in the story, but the girl's reward. . . . There is, the American legend, tells [her] a good-looking man with dough, who will put an end to the onerous tedium...
...present the salvage men have hungry eyes turned on the two large bronze rhinoceros in front of the Biology labs, Mom Hall's fancy trappings, and the shiny copper doors to the swimming pool. They will be satisfied, nevertheless, with the fences around the clubs, any old pianos in the College and sundry asseried junk...