BOURGEOIS DERIDED

Wairarapa Times-Age, 20 January 1939, Page 7

BOURGEOIS DERIDED

CARICATURES IN ITALY. Among other exhibitions ol sellsufficiency, the Secretary of the Italian Fascist Party is arranging a show of caricatures denouncing the bourgeois, chiefly by making fun of him. ft is easy, comments “The Times,” to imagine how Italians, Russians, Germans, and members of other nationalities which have been freed from the affectations of bourgeoisie will shake their sides with laughter at the show, while the poor burgeois blushes and bows his head in shame. Some of the subjects suggested seem scarcely fair —five o’clock tea, for instance. The bourgeois who takes five o’clock tea in any country but England is a fool; but he is no sybarite nor coward that will subject his palate and his health to so great a danger. Lectures, again, in at least one of the democratic countries are held so great a bore that they are welcomed nowhere but at schools, where a lecture counts instead of prep. Opening ceremonies may be supposed to be perpetrated in totalitarian as well as in bourgeois countries, so there again our withers are unwrung. But how will the bourgeois mentality maintain its self-respect before the mockery of its more fundamental weaknesses —its spineless love of leisure. of the arts, and of harmless games and amusements, its wasteful hospitality, its fussy care for order and fitness in the externals of life, its antiquated convention of courtesy to women, its sentimental dislike of the bully, and its nonsensical, unprofitable sympathy with the bullied?