Word: novak
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Novak has made it. And-would the WASPS believe?-he isn't happy about it. With pride and a certain bitterness, he is now reclaiming his ethnic identity. Nor does he regard this step as a private pilgrimage. Noting such things as the appearance of "Kiss Me, I'm Italian" buttons and the proliferation of Irish-American autobiography, Novak presumes to speak for the 70 million American descendants of immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Spain, Greece, Armenia and the Slavic nations. "In the 1960s," he writes, "the blacks and the young had their day." The '70s will...
Passionately and erratically combining scholarship with manifesto writing, Novak begins his argument with a rather familiar counterattack. The WASP model for behavior has got to go. WASP America, "more like a religion than like a nation," has demanded of its joiners a "conversion of the soul." Novak blames the WASP for everything from birth control to Women's Lib ("infected with WASP individualism"). Say "WASP" to Novak and he sees cold "modernity," antiseptic blandness. Say "ethnic" and he sees colorful people, starring at family feasts, full of a fierce loyalty to their neighborhood and to the old pieties-spiritually...
...Novak's notions of revolution blend a variety of the new populism (TIME, April 17), with a dream of "cultural pluralism." Novak talks bravely of "a policy that will guide the nation for thirty years-that is what we need." But his own suggestions tend to be vague: "Life will slow down," "new cities" will be built "on a human scale." Or nostalgic: There should be a William Morris-like return to handicrafts and cottage industries. Or whimsical: Let one million New Yorkers move to Iowa, where "there are green fields and hills, jobs and dignity...
Other planks in the Novak platform for a better America...
...When Novak gets down to serious, vote-winning politics, he stipulates a coalition of "blacks and ethnic whites" as "inevitable." While admitting that, to the blacks, all whites look alike for the moment, he asks wistfully: "Couldn't they distinguish a fellow sufferer under Nordic prejudice from a WASP...