Word: wasps
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...three John Cheever stories for TV in 1979, Playwright A.R. Gurney Jr. (The Dining Room, Scenes from American Life) seemed ideally suited to write one of the scripts. Gurney has been for the stage what Cheever was for fiction: the foremost chronicler of the foibles and angst of the Wasp upper middle class. The adaptation succeeded. But it also pointed up a significant difference between Cheever's striving suburbia and Gurney's blue- blood Buffa- lo: while many of Cheever's bedeviled characters are avidly accumulating, almost all of Gurney's etiolated aristocrats are watching the family fortune fade away...
...land acquisition, and government loans in the millions. The recipient groups include ethnic groups, business groups galore, veterans, tobacco, cotton, dairy, soybean, wheat and other farmers and land speculators. When "social power" was the mechanism of affirmatively targeting benefits (during, say, the era of middle class an upper class WASP hegemony from 1860-1920), this was essentially "politics by other means" to crib Clausewitz...
...veteran gaining educational and job benefits, is immobilized and job better or worse, it just doesn't work this way in. American society. And I consider any suggestion by New Right writers that it should work this way for Blacks--but not for Blacks-but not for Irish, Polish, WASP, Italian and other Americans--just a lot nonsense. And malevolent nonsense at that. Martin Killson Professor of Government
Thrust among them is a fictional couple, both, fittingly enough, students of social anthropology. Allan Archibald, a moneyed North Shore Wasp, witnesses the murder of the reporter and on a bet undertakes to write a scholarly paper about the Chicago underworld. Irena Giron, a brilliant but unworldly girl from the Polish ghetto "back of the yards," catastrophically encourages Allan to learn more about the style and ferocity of the syndicate. Organized Crimes is part political satire, part informal history, part rumination on the Depression, part love story between the rich boy poor in spirit and the poor girl rich...
...course, Lavinia is wicked. And of course, she gets what she deserves, in an upper-class Washington, well-bred sort of way. The stereotypical WASP ice-week floating through life manipulating all comers, Lavinla does exactly what's expected from her marries well, reproduces, continues to make other people's lives miserable She's smart but so shallow that it's hard to tell if she recognizes the in significance of her own existence. After a while, you realize you've seen it before and, what's more, don't particularly care...