Word: upper-class
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BERNARD MERGENDEILER was first sketched by Jules Feiffer in New York City in the late 1950's. An upper-class urban liberal, about 25 years old, he was anxiety-ridden and obsessed with sex, but he usually had to settle for platonic "meaningful relationships...
...unattributed empty slogans and hollow promises, and anonymous records of supporting shameful legislation. The identities of these noble statesmen need be revealed only to the one constituency which might be expected to appland the kinds of policies we've seen this last year and a half: the corporate and upper-class interests who sign the campaign fund checks...
...other sins. She was an awkward, serious girl, nicknamed "Granny" by her mother. She did arouse at least the admiration of her cousin Franklin, whom she married when she was 20, but her attitude toward sex, which she recommended to her daughter Anna, was the proper one for upper-class women of her time: it was an ordeal to be borne. In 1918. as a young mother of five children, she was crushed, but not quite destroyed, to learn that her dashing husband, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, was having an affair with her own pretty social secretary, Lucy...
...upper-class English had a genius for travel; they took their imperial self-confidence with them into the world. Some of them, like T.E. Lawrence, wanted to be someone else; like all intelligent travelers, he knew that landscape is an articulate moral category. He found a hard, almost fanatical clarity in Arabia, a purity that transformed the unhappy Englishman into a mystic desert hero. Other Englishmen and Americans, aloof, invulnerable, their servants laboring under steamer trunks and their gazes trained on cathedrals and Pyramids, traveled almost as a means of confirming their own moral superiority. They took their baksheesh back...
...message, if any, emerging from the twin cases is apparent only through examining the shades of difference between the upper-class crimes. Barry Locke, the high-level bureaucrat who stole tax dollars typifies the evil outcast. Unlike in other recent corruption scandals--like those of Bert Lance, Jimmy Carter's budget director, and Hugh Casey, Ronald Reagan's CIA director--no one stood up for Locke. The day he was charged King suspended him without pay. The day he was convicted, King called the whole affair "unfortunate." The public now scorns, cars, parodying the "Make it in Massachusetts" bumper stickers...