Word: sheed
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...WILFRID SHEED...
...pages. Sheed & Ward...
...When Sheed is not dashing off social history as clever cartoons, he is apt to be carving out aphorisms: "As with God in the late Middle Ages, all that there is to know about the Mafia seems to be known by now except whether it actually exists." God keeps coming up again and again in Sheed's text except, of course, in an essay on the church in which he points out glumly that "sex had long since become more interesting than God" to American Catholics...
Homo Americanus. To call Sheed antichurch, anti-labor or even anti-Mafia is to underestimate how anti-everything else he may be. If he does not really like these subcultures, he suspects they are better than U.S. culture as a whole. What he complains about in America's tribes-within-the-tribe is not that they are too idiosyncratic but that they are not idiosyncratic enough. "Mobsters and bishops" share the same "heavy disingenuousness." Labor threatens to form an "Establishment troika with business and government." Fiery young Mafiosi will be left to "man the switchboard and analyze the computer...
...Sheed cannot take his mobs quite seriously, it is because he takes so seriously the needs they are failing to answer. Just as all art strives to be music, "every organization," Sheed assumes, "strives to be a religion." The true believers signaling wildly inside every American joiner, he concludes, "already wander the streets looking for stranger cults, wilder religions. The more bloodless buy books called You're Really a Terrific Person, desperately making the most of what's left when you lose defining associations." In the end, outside-insiders play prophet rather than reporter and are subject...