In this article Joseph Epstein waxes sentimental about the good old days when WASPs controlled America. One of my friends objected that WASPs were largely anti-Jew. True, and I experienced it.
I consider Joseph Epstein to be one of the great fiction writers and commentators of our time. I don't read fiction, except in rare instances. I was spoiled at the University of Chicago by all of the great fiction. Some of the world's crappiest English writers are celebrated as good writers today. It's a waste of time to read their trash. Alice Walker is a perfect example.
I do read Epstein's short stories.
I feel somewhat the same as Epstein does about WASPs because we have one of the most dishonest, incompetent, mean-spirited human beings as president. Barack Obama (and Bill Clinton) could never have come from a WASP background. They were not fundamentally raised to be decent competent public servant's (they weren’t ‘raised’ at all). The outrages of Obama are so horrible as to make one miss the old WASPs .
We can afford to be sentimental because we, America, have become the first country in the history of the world on the planet to have gotten rid of our hereditary upper class.
We did it as of 1960. I experienced the world of WASPs before that and continued to experience it while the structure was falling apart in the early 1960’s. It is gone. We can joke about it now; we can wax sentimental. It is gone.
If you have the slightest doubt that the WASPs world is gone, look at the top hundred richest Americans. They do not know each other, so there is no social class, and there is not a single old line family in the bunch. All the people, or their father’s, made their money in the contemporary non-WASP world.
Sadly, every American city is now run by disgusting, demonic, zombie union Democrats who have replaced the old WASP hierarchy. Detroit started its tragic decline just when the WASPs died out. Detroit is the future of many American cities. It's tragic what the Union-Democrats are doing now. But the old WASP world was much worse for commerce as a whole.