Word: uppers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Harvard did manage to net the ball once, as a Ken Ruoff shot landed in the right side of goal. But the tally, which came 20 minutes into the second period, was negated on a handball call. Ruoff deflected a pass off his upper body following a Ramy Rajballie corner kick, and the officials ruled that hands were used on the play...
...same time, Americans were realizing the need to protect the natural environment, and for some of the same quasi-spiritual reasons, they discovered that old buildings had a level of craftsmanship and stylistic integrity seldom achieved in modern buildings and a patina that could not be faked. The upper classes had always prized antiques and reveled in the old. For the first time, the upwardly ambitious American middle class acquired that aristocratic penchant...
...mainly white) middle-class homesteaders into poor (mainly black and Hispanic) urban neighborhoods -- is neither the cause nor an effect, exactly, of the historic renovation boom. But the two trends have abetted each other. The original '60s militants of the preservation movement were the shock troops of the upper middle class, and it was a broader swath of the same class who in the '70s made living amid urban antiquity seem both virtuous and stylish. Restored carriage houses and pressed-tin ceilings have seduced more children of the suburbs back to the city than mean, shiny apartment towers...
...UPPER class nevertheless flagrantly ignores the very laws it has passed to control drugs. While they hold the rest of the population to a "Just Say No" standard, well-off adults and their children follow different rules. Stockbrokers and jet-setters snort coke at home while their sons and daughters smoke pot at parties. They know they are breaking the law, but they just don't care beyond their fear of getting caught...
Wolfe's main conceit is that the upper classes are especially vulnerable to prejudicial treatment if they lose their insulation. Sherman McCoy of Park Avenue and Southampton, the leading bond salesman at Pierce & Pierce, learns this harsh lesson when he is arrested for hit-and-run driving and plummets from a "Master of the Universe" to "the Great White Defendant," the dream of every ambitious $36,000-a-year assistant district attorney...