He talks here about WASPs (and Catholic-WASP hybrids like the Kennedys), but I believe there is a Catholic parallel. I think immediately of Robert Hughes, Gary Wills, and Wilfrid Sheed... Raises a whole set of thoughts and questions about Modernity, Education, and Affluence. Especially this:In a 1984 C-SPAN interview with Brian Lamb, Alsop good-naturedly smokes through half a pack of cigarettes while admitting the WASP ascendancy is over, perhaps for the best. In his final days before dying in 1989 he repeatedly asked listeners if God exists. His funeral at a historic Episcopal D.C. church concluded with a hymn that had always concluded his family reunions in his youth, “God Be with You till We Meet Again.”
Alsop’s religious doubts were evidently common among the Georgetown Set. Phil Graham, during his ongoing collapse, had sought spiritual solace from New York Times columnist James Reston, mistakenly believing him to be devout. Reston could not help. The Set, along with the larger WASP elite, lost their confidence and prominence partly because they had lost their own faith, only periodically celebrating rites at tasteful Protestant sanctuaries. Alsop’s stepson, after his own spiritual crisis, became a Unitarian Universalist minister.
Monday, February 16, 2015
WASP infestations
Our own Guy Noir - Private Eye, referring to Mark Tooley's "Triumph and Decline of America’s Protestant Ascendancy" (American Spectator, February 3, 2015), writes:
While The Ivy League CIA men were going on and on and on about the Soviet Union and its dire threats globally, men like James Dale Davidson and Willaim Rees-Mogg were predicting its ineluctable collapse owing to economics.
ReplyDeleteThe latter two men were light years ahead of the CIA in predicting the collapse of the Soviet Union (The CIA never made such a prediction) which makes one wonder just how moral and intelligent the boys from Skull and Bones were/are if they completely whiffed on the Soviet Union.
O, and it ought be noted that these United States has supplanted the Soviet Union as the evil Empire for since our inception, we have been an Empire just waiting for the money and material and men to flesh out the ideological insanity of our founders who considered their own selves to be like a new Israel and all they encountered in and around America - all ethnic Catholic, Indians etc - were to be treated like Cananites suitable solely for death and destruction.
The Jews supplanted the WASPS b ut we are not supposed to notice that they are largely settled in two empires
ReplyDeletehttp://isteve.blogspot.com/2013/08/noblesse-oblige-in-21st-century.html