Word: wasps
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Almost never does a U.S. playwright deal with bloodlines, class lines and cultural totems and taboos. That is what makes A.R. Gurney Jr.'s drama something of a novelty. It is not a play, properly speaking, but a series of vignettes, almost like revue sketches, set in Northeastern Wasp territory, where the inhabitants go to Ivy League schools, often possess inherited wealth and hold their opinions in their obdurate spines...
...fighting raged on. The army claimed to have suffered 16 dead and 31 wounded in the action, but the casualty toll may have been substantially higher. Said TIME Photographer Harry Mattison, who witnessed the fighting: "Dead bodies were being stacked like logs. The army decided to hit a wasp's nest and was heavily stung...
Granted that the armed forces of World War II were as racially segregated as an Alabama bus and that WASP men governed all the centers of power, the New Deal nonetheless represented the first real recognition of the right of Jews, blacks and other minorities to take part in government. "On a very wide front and in the truest possible sense," Joseph Alsop writes in his new FDR: A Centenary Remembrance, "Franklin Delano Roosevelt included the excluded...
...systematically and legally oppressing other Americans in the name of the greater corporate good. Helping Hooker Chemical explain away Love Canal or Ford disguise the problems with its Pinto is sorry work, no better if done by a Black man or a woman than by a prep-school WASP...
Lumet wisely does not go the ethnic cross-section route in selecting Ciello's fellow cops, avoiding the one Black, one Jew, one Irishman, one Italian and one WASP solidarity of scores of war movies. The New York Police force, its press releases notwithstanding, still operates in ethnic cliques, still works on a team concept. Lumet does not dress it up with any phony cross-cultural exchange. Even though more artistic exploration has focused on the criminal class than on its pursuers, anyone who has bothered to look at cops has seen the remarkable, almost symbiotic relationship among them...