Word: wasps
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...themes, (there are none), but from the droppings of Crumb's bathroom wit that Bakshi slaps into his narrative. (A Ph.d. candidate will someday call Fritz 'picaresque'). Fritz's black-talking, muscle flexing crow friends are the natural men of his world, though Fritz himself is far from psychotically WASP-ish. All the traditional Americans--pig cops and hardhats and a hound dirt-farmer--are sweating ignoramuses so whacked-out by work that they can't ever get it together. Radical politicos and Hell's Angels join paws in the headiest mix since PCPJ; even Orthodox Jews are ribbed mercilessly...
...Novak's Slovak grandparents, oppressed by the Austro-Hungarian empire, emigrated to the United States for the classic reasons. One grandfather became a Pennsylvania farmer. One grandmother, widowed, hired out as housekeeper and laundress. Novak's parents mobiled upward, from Johnstown's Slovak ghetto to "the WASP suburb on the hill." Then Michael went the rest of the way. He is a sober-profiled Catholic professor of philosophy and religion, currently at the State University of New York. But with a book in one hand (perhaps even his own A Theology for Radical Politics) and a pipe...
Passionately and erratically combining scholarship with manifesto writing, Novak begins his argument with a rather familiar counterattack. The WASP model for behavior has got to go. WASP America, "more like a religion than like a nation," has demanded of its joiners a "conversion of the soul." Novak blames the WASP for everything from birth control to Women's Lib ("infected with WASP individualism"). Say "WASP" to Novak and he sees cold "modernity," antiseptic blandness. Say "ethnic" and he sees colorful people, starring at family feasts, full of a fierce loyalty to their neighborhood and to the old pieties-spiritually...
When Novak gets down to serious, vote-winning politics, he stipulates a coalition of "blacks and ethnic whites" as "inevitable." While admitting that, to the blacks, all whites look alike for the moment, he asks wistfully: "Couldn't they distinguish a fellow sufferer under Nordic prejudice from a WASP...
...line Dorchester Street and West Broadway for the St. Patrick's Day Parade are Harvard undergraduates, newspaper reporters, and other worthies trying to find out what the Irish are like. The politicians at the annual Dorgan's St. Patrick's Day dinner are likely to be Italians or WASP's, and Republicans at that and the shortage of nuns has led the Boston Archdiocese to close down dozens of porochial schools...