The Daily Blague

A fairly accurate representation. My dear wife, Kathleen, discerns a resemblance to Sean Connery, but I think I look more like a bald Zardoz.

A little story from boarding-school days – little, because I don’t remember how it began. Whether I said something, or whether it was just the fact that I was wearing a vest (waistcoat in English) to glee club practice, but sharp Jack Kennard (Blair, ’64) turned around on the risers and proclaimed that I was a ‘bourgeois buffoon.’ Within a very short time, minutes practically, everybody called me ‘Bougie’ (with the ‘ou’ pronounced like the the ‘u’ in ‘Bushie,’ and the ‘g’ as in ‘triage’). Of course I thought it was monstrous and unkind. But the speed with which the name caught on clearly meant that there was something in it. In the later Sixties, when even at Notre Dame everybody I knew but me was reading Frantz Fanon and Norman O Brown, I took to observing that, come the revolution, I’d be first on line for the guillotine. Eccentric liberals who hang out with shaggy revolutionaries are always the first to go when the blood starts running.

It was only recently that I began to be proud of being bourgeois. That’s probably because the word doesn’t mean quite what it used to.

Copyright (c) 2009 Pourover Press

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