Word: upper-class
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...matter of this small, strangely schizophrenic novel literally becomes the colonel's own sentences, his semifictional forays into his own Aussie boyhood during the '20s and '30s. Gingerly he launches into an account of life with his upper-class Sydney family: a barrister father, a tennis-playing mother, "unforgettable-character" grandparents, a funny, Christian Science-spouting sister. The result is a tender exercise in memory quite touching in its own right. Even the Chinese interrogator soaks it all up with pleasure. Then he uses it in a hyperbolic scene that involves hypnotizing the colonel and forcing...
...some extent, Wasps are presiding over the dissolution of their own dominion, and they are proud of it. In a book he wrote four years ago, The Protestant Establishment, Sociologist E. Digby Baltzell criticized upper-class Wasps for establishing a caste system in many places. Today, he gives them credit for being neither "arrogant nor insensitive. They are the least prejudiced people as far as intermarriage is concerned. Catholics are much more prejudiced and Jews are the worst of all." The great assimilating Presidents of this century-the two Roosevelts-were quintessential Wasps...
...perfect candidate," wrote Harvard Professors Edward Banfield and James Wilson, "is of Jewish, Polish, Italian or Irish extraction and has the speech, dress, manners and the public virtues-honesty, impartiality and devotion for public interest-of the upper-class Anglo-Saxon...
Ironically, it was a member of a Roman Catholic dynasty, John F. Kennedy, who added new luster to Wasp ideals. He was such a model Wasp with his dry humor, his laconic eloquence and his lack of sentimentality, that he set a style which encouraged many authentic upper-class Wasps to take heart and to run for political office. John D. Rockefeller IV was one. He was followed by George Bush in Texas, William L. Saltonstall and John Winthrop Sears in Massachusetts and Bronson La Follette in Wisconsin. "In previous times, you had to be born in a log cabin...
...adequate when only a small upper-class elite could afford a higher education, but nearly 500,000 young Italians are now enrolled and overcrowding is becoming explosive. Many priests oppose their bishops on the issue of contraception, partly because the newly urbanized faithful can scarcely afford the large families that were an asset on the farm. As more and more women take jobs, they increasingly demand equal rights, including repeal of the old law that prescribes prison for adulterous women...