Word: wasps
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...Mueller took the helm of the Justice Department's criminal division in 1990, his subordinates liked to tease him about his Ivy-League roots, his stiffly formal public persona and the pressed blue jeans that were his idea of dressed-down for Saturdays in the office. His high WASP name - Robert Swan Mueller III - spawned the nickname "Bobby Three Sticks...
...Bush is a throwback when it comes to this new style of political bravado. His combination of Wasp reticence and Texas canniness gives him an old-fashioned feel. If Clinton was often too clever by half, in Disraeli's famous phrase, Bush sometimes deliberately seems only half-clever. But who do we like more: the smartest kid in class who sits in the first row and answers every question, or the fellow who sits in the back row and surprises you when he gets the right answer? I'm sure George Bush never sat in the first...
...this can lend itself to the kind of tired potshots against Wasp repressiveness that sometimes marred Beauty, with the open-casket funeral standing in for suburbia's houses made of ticky-tack. The show can be glib, and there are too many one-dimensional peripheral characters, like episode four's Latino gangbangers. But the leads are richly drawn and well cast; theater veteran Hall finds layers within layers in tightly wound David. In the pilot's finest scene, Nathaniel's funeral, Nate makes a self-indulgent show of refusing to sprinkle dirt on the grave from a tidy canister, protesting...
...Oscar host's job is to make inside jokes - about the industry, its most prominent employees and the stately ludicrousness of the event itself - that nearly a billion viewers around the world can pretend to understand. This year, that task fell to Martin, the first WASP to chair the event since David Letterman in 1995 (bad omen) and the first white-haired guy since Johnny Carson (1979-82 and 1984). Indeed, Martin's persona is a gloss on the old "Tonight Show" star; for 30 years he's played a doofus Carson, a smug buffoon. "Please," he said during...
...most of today's alumni have little connection--and even less in common--with the present population of the College. We're not just female and Jewish--we're even further from the traditional Crimson WASP than that. With whom at the College would alumni specifically seek connection, anyway? Their houses have been randomized, their final clubs rejected and their fellow Harvardians (gasp) diversified. A few vestiges of the Old Boys' Club still prosper, thank goodness, but even those are fading fast. (The Fly Club now includes four--four--minorities...