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History Forum / General / British History / March 2006Re: Tom Wolfe Speaks Truth About "Liberalism"
Tom Wolfe, Yale Ph.D. '57, is one of America's finest writers. He wrote _The Right Stuff_ among many others. DSH ----------------------------------------- Joseph Rago reports: "Mr. Wolfe offers a personal incident as evidence of "what a fashion liberalism is." A reporter for the New York Times called him up to ask why George W. Bush was apparently a great fan of the "Charlotte Simmons" book. "I just assumed it was the dazzling quality of the writing," he says. In the course of the reporting, however, it came out that Mr. Wolfe had voted for the Bush ticket. "The reaction among the people I move among was really interesting. It was as if I had raised my hand and said, 'Oh, by the way, I forgot to tell you, I'm a child molester.'" For the sheer hilarity, he took to wearing an American flag pin, "and it was as if I was holding up a cross to werewolves." George Bush's appeal, for Mr. Wolfe, was owing to his "great decisiveness and willingness to fight." But as to "this business of my having done the unthinkable and voted for George Bush, I would say, now look, I voted for George Bush but so did 62,040,609 other Americans." "Now what does that make them? Of course, they want to say -- 'Fools like you!' . . . But then they catch themselves, 'Wait a minute, I can't go around saying that the majority of the American people are fools, idiots, bumblers, hicks.' So they just kind of dodge that question. And so many of them are so caught up in this kind of metropolitan intellectual atmosphere that they simply don't go across the Hudson River." "They literally do not set foot in the United States. We live in New York in one of the two parenthesis states. They're usually called blue states -- they're not blue states, the states on the coast. They're parenthesis states -- the entire country lies in between."" Joseph Rago -- 11 March 2006 -- The Wall Street Journal ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- DSH Lux et Veritas et Libertas Vires et Honor Spencer writes: > [Joseph Rago quotes writer Tom Wolfe:] > ...'Wait a minute, I can't go > around saying that the majority of the American people are fools, idiots, > bumblers, hicks.' Maybe *he* can't. [Three newsgroups removed] > Spencer writes: > [quoted text clipped - 7 lines] > > [Three newsgroups removed] "he" didn't. Spencer writes: > [Joseph Rago quotes writer Tom Wolfe:] > ...'Wait a minute, I can't go > around saying that the majority of the American people are fools, idiots, > bumblers, hicks.' Maybe *he* can't. [Three newsgroups removed] Tom Wolfe, Yale Ph.D. '57, is one of America's finest writers. He wrote _The Right Stuff_ among many others. DSH ------------------------------------------------------------------- Joseph Rago reports: "But such psychologizing gets us nowhere. So take Mr. Wolfe's politics. He denies outright any agenda: "I'm just giving the news," he says, more than once. Fair enough. Yet Mr. Wolfe is a wild goose. "I Am Charlotte Simmons," particularly in its notice of the coarse sexuality governing campus life, is a book a liberal would never write, as corroborated in the many negative reviews: "'Oh, big deal, they're having sex in college, yawn, yawn, what a surprise,'" as Mr. Wolfe puts it. "I do not disallow the possibility that they just didn't like it," he continues, but he was frankly taken aback by those who took it "as a counterrevolutionary attack on the sexual revolution. . . . Then it really dawned on me that so many people are proud of the sexual revolution, you know, 'We freed ourselves from those damned religious people and this Puritanism.'" "At least in the story," he pains to note, all this "has a very deleterious affect on a very innocent albeit egotistical girl -- and that's I think what's there." Sign of the times, I suppose, when you're considered conservative for exploring the very real consequences of cultural change. This is Tom Wolfe's MO -- sorting out and at once demolishing pretension, snobbery, vanity in all its guises. "There is such a thing as intellectual fashion -- just as we get our clothing fashions -- and often it does not mean anything more," he says. "One follows fashion in order to look proper, and it's the same thing with ideas." Yes, and "Liberalism" has been capitalizing on that preening intellectual fashion for 70 years -- about as long as the Communist intellectual fashion endured in Russia. -- DSH An example: [Wolfe -- DSH] "We know Sigmund Freud was a quack -- the guy believed in dream interpretation, like every witch doctor in the history of the world. . . . How could Freud, a sophisticated man, go around interpreting dreams?" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- DSH Lux et Veritas et Libertas Vires et Honor |
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