Word: wasps
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Marlon Brando's emergence in the early '50s registered a drastic change in the cultural weather. The masculine ideal reflected in the Hollywood mirror had been basically suave and gentlemanly. Brando, who grew up middle class, Midwestern and Wasp, radiated pure working-class alienation -- an inarticulate promise of danger, sex and social abrasion. Which is why, as TIME film critic Richard Schickel tells us in BRANDO: A LIFE IN OUR TIMES (Atheneum; $21.95), he was a mythic presence for all the young urban professionals of the '50s. Rude but sensitive, rough but anguished, Brando was their version of pastoral...
Roxana Robinson is a fly on the wall in the world of the Wasp. The people in her stories are inheritors of urbanity and indulgences. They belong to garden and bridge clubs; they have exceptional houses, servants, luxuries -- and woes. A Glimpse of Scarlet (HarperCollins; 200 pages; $18.95) watches a divorced mother betrayed by her son's prep school roommate; a man's failing eyesight turn into a "treason of the body"; wavering between wife and mistress, a publishing executive experiences moral vertigo in his ordered world; a wife holds her husband up to public ridicule, only to have things...
...effective control method for a limited area is a product called Daminex, which is a tube filled with pesticide-soaked cotton. Mice take the cotton to build nests, and the pesticide kills ticks. On Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket, scientists are planning to release large numbers of a tiny wasp called Hunterellus hookeri. Success is uncertain. The wasps do kill some tick nymphs, but may in fact need a large and healthy tick population to maintain their own numbers. Other drastic preventives that householders mutter about while untaping their trousers -- region-wide burning of fields, pesticide spraying or slaughter...
Both impulses have shared a very American respect for legalistic thinking -- not surprisingly, since so many American diplomats were Wasp lawyers. They searched, as George Kennan put it, for "formal criteria of a juridical nature by which the permissible behavior of states could be defined." The rest of the world was often baffled by our devotion to this search, even as it made the rest of the world baffling to us. "To the American mind," Kennan added, it was "implausible that people should have positive aspirations more important to them than the peacefulness and orderliness of international life." Still, whether...
...invasion of Kuwait was intended to be a simple lawyerly proposition. Because we wanted to be honest brokers, we assured Saddam that we had no position on the precise location of the Iraq- Kuwait border. The only problem with our offer was that Saddam, who is not a Wasp lawyer, took it to mean that we didn't care whether there was an Iraq- Kuwait border...