Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.natrev From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: THE MISANTHROPE'S CORNER Date: Mon, 16 Nov 92 11:57:05 EST Message-ID: THE MISANTHROPE'S CORNER Familee Miss King's latest book is With Charity Toward None (St. Martin's Press). MY RECENT remarks on ''Huggee'' drew so many supportive letters that I shall continue my assault on emotional warmth. Of the six candidates for national office in the late campaign, five were named Bush, Quayle, Clinton, Gore, and Stockdale. It was a veritable fes- tival of Anglo-Saxons, but you never would have known it. A true Wasp would just as soon break out of an egg or rise from the sea on a shell, but the Gang of Five never shut up about Familee. ''The English,'' wrote G. M. Trevelyan, ''have always been singular for caring little about their cousins and ignoring their distant relatives.'' The language of the Anglo-Saxon race has no words to denote the rela- tionship between one in-law and his or her opposite number. In Yiddish the father-in-law is the machuten and the mother-in-law the machetay- neste, and all relatives by marriage are called machetunim. In Waspish they're called ''Oh, God, here they come!'' By forcing us into tongue-twist- ers like ''my daughter-in-law's brother's father-in-law,'' Waspish discour- ages us from even talking about them, much less inviting them to visit. It's a Wasp thing, but Al Gore doesn't understand. Watching the face of little Albert Gore III while his calculatingly smarmy father described his son's injuries in explicit detail at the Democratic Convention, it was ob- vious the embarrassed child longed to heed the call of his genes and be- come one of those plucky lads who leave home at 12. The little Wasp wanderer was immortalized in Thomas Hovenden's painting, Breaking Home Ties, and in the nineteenth-century ballad, ''Where Is My Wandering Boy Tonight?'' Seeking his fortune out West or going to sea as a cabin boy, he never saw his own family again, but he hit it off so well with someone else's that he became the sole heir of a rich stranger for whom he did some minor good turn -- like Pip taking food and drink to the escaped convict in Great Expectations. The will reading is full of infuriated blood relatives, as well it might be: ''I, Edward Fairfield, having disowned my four sons and declared them le- gally dead, do hereby give and bequeath all my worldly goods to Thomas Trueheart, who very kindly returned my lost scarf thirty years ago. So that my sisters will not be able to interfere with my wishes in this matter, I leave them each the sum of one dollar.'' Waspdom's straggly family ties fascinated the Eastern European immi- grants who built the Hollywood movie industry. The remittance man whose family pays him to stay in Rangoon, having no parallel in Jewish life, exerted a morbid hold on the Jewish imagination. So did letters marked RETURN TO SENDER remailed from Tasmania, or funerals at- tended by no one except a dry-eyed housekeeper played by Agnes Moore- head, but what really enthralled the moguls was the Wasp-sister plot. Two sisters loathe each other. One is plain, the other is pretty; one cleans the house, the other messes it up; one is a virgin, the other is a wanton; one wears glasses, the other can see in the dark. Something has happened to put what Wasps call ''bad blood'' between them -- a redun- dancy, that: to our way of thinking, bad blood is the only kind of blood there is. Someone is planning to drown someone. It's an easy death to arrange because the sisters always live on a bleak, blustery, inaccessible coast. They must go to the mainland to pick up their mail, and Mean Sister al- ways rows. Nice Sister can't swim. If drowning fails, Mean Sister chops at a tree until it falls on Nice Sis- ter's side of the house. Failing that, Mean Sister tries to drive Nice Sister insane. She gets up in the middle of the night and moves the furniture, tampers with the grandfather clock that hasn't lost a second in fifty years, kills squirrels and nails them to the door, and so on. Driving someone in- sane is hard work, but after all, she's your sister. Nice Sister obediently loses her mind, but instead of sending her to an asylum, Mean Sister decides to take care of her at home. Why the sudden solicitude? Because 15 years earlier, Mean Sister stole Nice Sister's fiance. Now her Wasp conscience asserts itself, as Wasp consciences will, and tells her that she must Do the Right Thing for the crazy bitch. IT SOUNDS like the end, but it isn't. Now comes the second climax, prov- ing that relatives are twice as bad as we thought. It's true that Mean Sis- ter married Nice Sister's fiance, which accounts for Mean Sister's guilt. But now we learn that on the wedding night, Nice Sister sneaked into the lighthouse to murder Mean Sister, and murdered the bridegroom by mis- take. This accounts for Nice Sister's greater guilt and explains why she has so graciously submitted to Mean Sister's cruelty all these years. After all, she had to make it up to the slut. Wasps have disdained the ties that bind because the political institu- tions we invented relieved us of the need to huddle together. Thanks to the dead white males who gathered at Runnymede, Americans have never heard the knock on the door in the middle of the night. Familee has less to do with ''traditional values'' than with an unspoken fear that our liber- ties are imperiled. -- FLORENCE KING This article is copyright 1992 National Review. 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