Word: parvenus
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Affairs are in the hands of parvenus and thugs; the best and the brightest cannot bail out the sinking ship...
...devotes 50 pages to the recitation of every known fact about the old colonel, forgetting that what history remembers and what Faulkner knew are different matters. Faulkner's South was a brooding presence, its fading grandeur stained by the sin of slavery, its future mortgaged to developers and parvenus...
...TIME describes the aura of greed in present-day Washington [April 2] but fails to explain the cause. The men at the top are essentially havenots, parvenus using the White House to further their personal ambitions...
...McGovern candidacy has already split the Democrats so badly that they are now in some ways two different parties-the McGovernites and the regulars. The McGovern forces -the young, the suburbanites, the intellectuals, an admixture of some blacks and blue-collar workers-are parvenus to the old party, a new political wave bred in complicated ways by Viet Nam, the assassinations, all the dislocations of the '60s. The others-labor, organization Democrats like Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, elected politicians -tend to have older and firmer roots in the party's traditional structure...
...revealing essay about her native Sacramento Valley, she mourns the passing of a comfortable, interlocking gentry that were her ancestry. They built manor houses amidst their vast fields of hops and tomatoes, ignoring post-World War II newcomers who brought real estate developments and aerospace factories-until the parvenus usurped their world. Like Faulkner, Didion has an overwhelming awareness of human corruption and a sense of unfathomable doom...