"Low class" Donald Trump and the Wasps: Reckoning with vulgarity, snobbery and the presidency

[Dennis Donovan]

https://www.salon.com/2020/02/17/low-class-donald-trump-and-the-wasps-reckoning-with-vulgarity-snobbery-and-the-presidency/



Trump is technically at least part Wasp, but he's clearly deficient in several crucial areas of our shared culture

NELL BERAM

FEBRUARY 17, 2020 1:00PM (UTC)

Try, just try to find a parody of a pair of Wasps more entertaining than Thurston and Lovey Howell of "Gilligan's Island." Played by Jim Backus, who was of Lebanese descent, and Natalie Schafer, who was Jewish, Thurston and Lovey behave the way people like to believe — and sometimes they're right — that real Wasps do: the Howells, possessors of fathomless inherited wealth, are duplicitous snobs who don't do any work. Some of the show's best lines nod to Thurston's blue-blooded Republicanism. When Lovey compliments him for being "democratic," he hears an uppercase D and snips at her, "Watch your language."

Thurston and Lovey are meant to be, like my ancestors of my mother's side, New England Wasps — in one episode, we're told that they're from Boston; another episode mentions a home in Newport, Rhode Island — but I don't recognize my family in the buffoonish Howells. True, my grandmother, whom I just about worshipped — she was quick-witted and cosmopolitan and tall, like Myrna Loy's Nora Charles in the "Thin Man" movies — was a Republican, and I did once witness her committing a Howell-ish act of snobbery. During a nostalgia road trip that brought us to her old neighborhood in Montclair, New Jersey, she described one style of residential architecture as "Wop," a derogatory term for Italian. She meant that the style looked modern, or like something that would never provide shelter for any self-respecting person whose ancestors came over on a boat in the queue behind the Mayflower.

If you had asked me about my background before Trump moved into the White House, I would have led with my father's Syrian side. (My long-legged, button-nosed maternal grandmother must have puzzled at the looks of me, short and with eyes and nostrils for days.) I saw my Wasp side as ethnically neutral — white bread that couldn't hold its own against all the more interesting loaves out there. But since Trump's presidency, I frequently find myself reaching for my grandmother's word, "vulgar," to describe him. You're using the word too, you say? Yes, but hopefully you're not using it with — what's this? — an involuntary air of condescension that I'm worried I may be mistaking for some sort of birthright.

I get why no one is standing on a chair and claiming Wasp as a cultural identity. Wasps went out in the mid-1900s, their markers — repressed colors, repressed emotions — swept aside in a cyclone of unkempt hair and pot smoke (some of it my mother's). Make no mistake: I'm as glad as anyone that Wasps got the cultural heave-ho — they'd been on top for far too long and have the whole snob thing to answer for. But last year I had some strangely gratifying eureka moments as I read Tad Friend's "Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor." I recognized in it the window dressing of my childhood: Welsh rarebit. Beatrix Potter. "Grandfather clocks and cocktail shakers brimming with gin." Yes indeed, these were my people — much more so than my Syrian side. After my mother and father divorced when I was two I lived primary with her, our small house accommodating a condensed version of Wasp splendor. It was only after my mother died, in 2010, and I, her only child, inherited a squadron of antique end tables, which she told me on her deathbed I wasn't allowed to sell, that I realized I knew of no other person my age who had grown up in a home that resembled the set of "Leave It to Beaver."

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Interesting take.

[underpants]

1. Cheerful Money

That book was in the break room at my last job. I took a pic of it to try to find it later.

Funny. Good read.