This trait makes me squirm even more than Trump's shticky name-calling, cotton candy hair, and allegiance to the trinity of lowbrow entertainment forms professional wrestling, reality television and the beauty pageant. The Trumps and the Howells have something else in common besides their obvious pleasure in displaying their money: they love to talk about it. When I was a kid and behaved badly, my mother would accuse me of acting "spoiled," which only now do I appreciate meant like someone with a shamefully conspicuous amount of loot. This is how the Howells would fail a true-life Wasp sniff test: people with old money think that it's poor form to flaunt it. 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."ĭonald Trump doesn't live in a home that resembles the set of "Leave It to Beaver." Like the Howells, Trump is a Republican who inherited wealth and enjoys shiny things - his wives, his Fifth Avenue pile - and he delights in showing them off. 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. "Grandfather clocks and cocktail shakers brimming with gin." Yes indeed, these were my people - much more so than my Syrian side. 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. 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.
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). I get why no one is standing on a chair and claiming Wasp as a cultural identity. 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. But since Trump's presidency, I frequently find myself reaching for my grandmother's word, "vulgar," to describe him. (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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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. When Lovey compliments him for being "democratic," he hears an uppercase D and snips at her, "Watch your language." Some of the show's best lines nod to Thurston's blue-blooded Republicanism. 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.
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