Word: wasps
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...each other. But now their elites are a desiccated remnant, trailing clouds of glory only in the Social Register, while the country cousins, mostly Southern, have energy without class. From George Washington to George Bush, from Henry Adams to Elvis (dead or alive): such is the decline of the Wasp...
...word Wasp -- white Anglo-Saxon Protestant -- conjures a thumbnail history such as this, compounded of memories of textbooks and shreds of slander. As thumbnail histories go, it is not inaccurate, except that it leaves out the Wasp's greatest legacy: the American character. Whether we like it or not, all the rest of us in becoming American have become more or less Wasps. Americanization has historically meant Waspification. It is the gift that keeps on giving...
...Wasp style placed a high value on industry and success and a correspondingly low value on anything that was not useful. All the nose-to- the-grindstone maxims of Benjamin Franklin found eager Wasp readers. Unchallenged by medieval or socialist countermodels, the Protestant work ethic flourished here like an animal species without predators. Admiration for hard work and the expectation that hard workers would have something to show for it became the starlings of the American soul...
Flatter than Texas, flimsier than New Year's resolutions, Colwin's supporting cast garnishes her narrative with outright cliches. Jane Louise's schoolmate, Edie, scandalizes her wealthy WASP family when she drops out of cooking school in Paris to marry Mokie, a Black man. Mokie, in turn, laughs at how uncomfortable he makes white people feel when they mistake him for a waiter. Sven, Jane Louise's colleague, manages to think and talk about nothing but sex, to send a frisson of enigma and anticipation down every woman's spine, yet maintain his job as director of the design department...
...rarely been posed more deftly and disarmingly than in the 21st work of the wistful comedist A.R. Gurney, whose best previous plays (Sweet Sue, Love Letters) also centered on the disruptive consequences of love unpursued. Gurney is often pegged as an elegist for the waning Wasp. In Later Life he makes great efforts to usher in characters outside that stereotype. They are Irish, Jewish, Texan and techno-nerd; one woman is a lesbian, one man gay, and these two fully transcend sketch comedy to offer poignant glimpses of self-destructive lives. Predictably, however, the central figure is a Wasp...