Whither the WASP?

There are a few of those old-school WASPs out there, lurking in the shadows around the Merion Cricket Club, but the society they built is as dead as Stonehenge. The mood of the Republican Party is not so much Anglo-Saxon as Celtic, with every would-be member of the House of Representatives doing his best impersonation of William Wallace . . . as imagined by Mel Gibson. These are lonely times for an Eisenhower man. The United States was, at its founding, something new in the world, and it has never stopped trying to link itself to ancient traditions, whether in the form of the crypto-monarchical spectacle of the State of the Union address or in the ridiculously bombastic pseudo-classical architecture of our hideous capital city, with its looming phallic all-father monument in the Egyptian style and its assortment of knock-off Pantheons and Panthéons and Romanesque porticos and colonnades, a nouveau riche style for a nouveau riche nation. (“It’s the riche that counts.”) That regurgitative tendency has echoes even in our own contemporary private life, with moneyed Americans play-acting at royalty in the suburban Tudor palaces surrounding New York City and the Tuscan “estates” on the fringes of Austin.