Old WASP Men
2012-03-01 - by
My cousin Spencer sat down, opened the newspaper, stared at the headline and landed in a world where old white WASP’s (like him) are dinosaurs.
Being a historian by avocation Spencer set about studying the collapse of WASPdom; at first he figured immigration (not modern immigration but old-fashioned immigration back in the 1820’s and 1840’s when hoards of Irishmen and Germans invaded the New World) was the taproot of that headline. I said:
‘Any sixty year old white male descendant of an Irishman or German reading that headline is thinking the same thing you are.’
Spencer thought about that a moment. ‘Then it probably started with Women’s Suffrage.’ I said:
‘Forget that. Getting the women in our family stirred up means doom.’
Spencer paused then progressed to the ‘Sexual Revolution.’ He said, ‘It’s a line straight as the scarlet thread from Sexual Liberation to Women’s Liberation to Gay Liberation to that headline.’
Beneath the headline was a picture of a smiling doctor in a white coat with a goatee who heads the Boston Children’s Hospital – only he wasn’t curing mumps or measles. He was curing children, as he said, of being “born in the wrong bodies.”
I never reckoned, Spencer said, it could come to this.
One night a sixty year old WASP lays down in his own bed and goes to sleep then the next morning he wakes up in a strange land where the newspaper headline reads: “Sex-changing treatment for kids is on the Rise.”
Old WASP Men
2012-03-01/
My cousin Spencer sat down, opened the newspaper, stared at the headline and landed in a world where old white WASP’s (like him) are dinosaurs.
Being a historian by avocation Spencer set about studying the collapse of WASPdom; at first he figured immigration (not modern immigration but old-fashioned immigration back in the 1820’s and 1840’s when hoards of Irishmen and Germans invaded the New World) was the taproot of that headline. I said:
‘Any sixty year old white male descendant of an Irishman or German reading that headline is thinking the same thing you are.’
Spencer thought about that a moment. ‘Then it probably started with Women’s Suffrage.’ I said:
‘Forget that. Getting the women in our family stirred up means doom.’
Spencer paused then progressed to the ‘Sexual Revolution.’ He said, ‘It’s a line straight as the scarlet thread from Sexual Liberation to Women’s Liberation to Gay Liberation to that headline.’
Beneath the headline was a picture of a smiling doctor in a white coat with a goatee who heads the Boston Children’s Hospital – only he wasn’t curing mumps or measles. He was curing children, as he said, of being “born in the wrong bodies.”
I never reckoned, Spencer said, it could come to this.
One night a sixty year old WASP lays down in his own bed and goes to sleep then the next morning he wakes up in a strange land where the newspaper headline reads: “Sex-changing treatment for kids is on the Rise.”