ABSTRACT
In America the justified reaction against Gaylord Babbitt's liberal and avant-garde banalities is losing its refreshing initial integrity, is becoming an opportunistic banality of its own. Therefore, the time has come to invent a third generation. Enter Gaylord's son Cabot Babbitt, epigone of the new conservatism, improvising his first name to sound not civilise but distingue. He is conservative not in the valid sense of that outlook but in the fad-parroting sense. As George Babbitt's Rotary Club was trumped by Gaylord's Cafe Chic on 56th Street, so the latter now gets trumped by Squire Cabot's Hunting-Lodge Salon for Cultivating Choice Old Values. In America the alternations of overadjustment have been between the stereotyped artiness of Gaylord, the stereotyped anti-art of George-plus-Cabot. Since 1952, Grandfather George's tastes and prejudices have been having a brief, doomed, but gaudy Indian summer. And this time, via Cabot's would-be conservatism, their rationalization is different, more sophisticated, more "spiritual."
