Word: wasps
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...DECLINE OF THE WASP...
What once made America great? What now makes America fairly awful? Schrag's answer to both questions: the WASP. The plot of Peter and the WASP goes like this...
...time, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants-Puritans and the children of Puritans-clamped a code on America as tight as the pillory. Ramrod stiff with duty, tense with work ethic, the code operated splendidly on the frontier, and more or less adequately until after World War II. But then WASP "defaulted on their birthright of cussedness and irreverence" and turned into what Schrag calls the "plastic WASP." Still claiming to be the model-the only model-for a Good American, the plastic WASP has ended up a crabby tyrant of pallid respectability...
...this point, Schrag proceeds to potshot all the easy targets in sight. Disneyland and Playboy, Pat Nixon and Doris Day, Billy Graham and flavorless bread-blaming them all on the WASP...
Schrag's monolithic reading runs its natural course to self-parody. But the sad thing is that in overestimating the WASP-both as hero and as villain -he underestimates everybody else. One would never guess that the most talented playwright in American history was a black Irishman named Eugene O'Neill, or that the wisest philosopher was a half-Spaniard, George Santayana. One would never suspect that America's only native art, jazz, was the invention of Americans who were neither Anglo-Saxon nor white...