The General, the Poet, and the Inquisition

I’ve had it.

                Familiar idiom: post-1940

“Tired”

                Pearl Bailey song hit: 1945

Nixon or Kennedy: Does It Make Ainy Difference?

                Title of political pamphlet: 1960

“Why not,” we wondered as we scanned the displays of closet accessories, sewing needs, hair-grooming aids, girdles, slippers, scuffs and wraps, rainwear, beachwear and sunglasses, and a disparate lot of items lumped together as novelties at the Midyear National Notion and Novelty Show in the New York Trade Show Building the other day, “why not try to turn the thoughts of the world from the space race and the missile hustle to the power for peace of notions and novelties?” And why not?

                ”The Talk of the Town,” The New Yorker: 1961

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, says the historian G. M. Young, England became “in spirit suburban.” Defining the latter phrase Young trims off various connotations of the term “suburban,” presumably in order to avoid attacks from positivists or others who claim that when a historian tells people what “really” happened in history he is merely talking about himself. He says that middle-class folk of the I820S found themselves “entangled in a way of life which [they] had not learned to control,” and were in consequence “instinctively fighting for breath.” And he thereby establishes that in his discourse “suburban” doesn’t mean Datchet or Kew or PTAs or golf clubs, but rather a peculiar stifled or stifling response to life, a suspicion that the best a man can find is a refuge (and a yearning that this suspicion could be quieted), a desperate need to act and a poorly hidden fear that, owing to the conditions of modern life, action is impossible. The term-trimming, as is obvious, does little to make the world described seem remote. And neither does a glance at the activities and gestures of the young who inhabited this world.