'WASP rot' is what ails us, Muffy

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Henry Allen knows why America is falling into a cataclysm of debt and can’t get out. "I know because I’ve seen the cataclysm before on a smaller but no less poignant scale while growing up in New England. A Boston friend calls it WASP rot: a squalor of doom and debt that prompts the best sort of people to spit sarcasms at each other during cocktail hour, to weep and rage the way Congress is doing as the debt limit looms on Aug. 2." Um, the "best sort of people?" Okay Allen, you're skating on thin ice here, buddy. You better deliver on your thesis without a hint of lordliness. Otherwise, sir, you'll force me to whip out John Lennon's first post-Beatles solo album and go all "Working Class Hero" on you. Continuing, the former Washington Post editor writes: "If the trust fund played out or Aunt Cornelia turned out to be broke when she died, the rotting WASPs believed they had no choice but to bear the burden of borrowing to maintain their place in the world. ... This is what the American government is doing, too. Whether the problem is summer places or wars, sailboats or health care, the despair and folly feel the same. So does the decline in power and prestige, and the poig­nant denial of decline, prompted by the fear that if we don’t live and spend a certain way we’ll cease to be us — we’ll lose our place in the world." Ah, I see. America as a kind of F. Scott Fitzgerald character, eh? I'm still not sure I buy it. But despite the moldy WASP framing, Allen does manage to spin an interesting if unconventional yarn about our current woes. Read it here.