mirror and then another mirror." When the wife had arguments with her husband, she cried or withheld her sexual favors. "I'd never do that!" the maid said indignantly. "I'd rather scream and shout and throw dishes than hold out on my husband that way."
The house is full of talk [she went on] even early in the morning. He's read something that's bothered him, and she's read something that's bothered her. They're both ready to phone their friends. The kids hear all that and they start complaining about what's bothering them—about school, usually. They're all so critical. I tell my kids to obey the teacher and listen to the priest; and their father gives them a whack if they cross him. But it's different when I come to fancy Cambridge. In that house, the kids speak back to their parents, act as fresh and snotty as can be. I want to scream sometimes when I hear those brats talking as if they know everything.
It is not hard to see why so much of this kind of indignation came to be vented on the figure of Benjamin Spock, a symbol of everything "middle Americans" distrusted. As the author of Baby and Child Care, Spock was identified in the popular mind not only with permissive child rearing but with intrusive medical and psychiatric expertise, so often invoked by those who condemned "working-class authoritarianism." As a leader in the antiwar movement, he symbolized the danger that a remissive morality would undermine civic order and patriotism. Workers had little enthusiasm for the war, but they resented the anti-Americanism so often expressed by the student movement. Their "reverence for the flag," according to Rieder, "embodied a style of patriotism sustained less by abstract ideals than by primordial sentiments of belonging to a particular place." The antiwar movement, on the other hand, denounced "Amerika" as a totalitarian society. "Suddenly, America was the enemy," Julius Lester has written in retrospect. "... Common sense should have told us that it is impossible to transform a nation if you hate it." But common sense played little part in the radical wing of the antiwar movement, which hoped to whip up opposition to the war by desecrating the flag, exposing national heroes like Jefferson and Lincoln as racists, imperialists, and male chauvinist pigs, and proclaiming its solidarity with
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