Sunday, December 22, 2013

"Finished as a Phenomenon of Public Significance"

"Calling something elite, which was how WASPs of an earlier era preferred to think of themselves, became a denunciation.  Being a WASP was no longer a source of happy pride but something distasteful if not slightly disgraceful--the old privileges of membership now seeming unjust and therefore badly tainted.  An old joke has one bee asking another bee why he is wearing a yarmulke.  'Because,' answers the second bee, 'I don't want anyone to take me for a WASP.'"

Joseph Epstein in The Wall Street Journal mourns the decline of the WASP Establishment.

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