Making the Cinders Dance - by Bruce S. Thornton

[M]

Making the Cinders Dance
The wonder of Tom Wolfe.

By Bruce S. Thornton, author of Greek Ways: How the Greeks Created
Western Civilization
July 21-22, 2001

Curtis Le May, asked once why the United States needed more nuclear
missiles when it already had the power to reduce the Soviet Union to
cinders, replied, "I want to see the cinders dance."

All of us who delight in exploding the arrogant hypocrisies and
pretensions of so-called "progressives" owe a debt to Tom Wolfe, who
over the years had made any number of squishy-left and postmodern
cinders dance. He was one of the first to see through the self-serving
cant of tony liberals who rationalize their privilege by delivering to
hoi-polloi hectoring, self-righteous sermons on tolerance and
sensitivity and social justice. We can thank Wolfe for popularizing,
in his devastating description of the infamous Leonard Bernstein
cocktail party for the thuggish Black Panthers, the term "radical
chic," which neatly communicates the real goal of most leftist
rhetoric since the sixties.. rank assertions of social superiority,
with ideas brandished like fashion accessories.

But that, of course, is not all. Wolfe along the way helped create the
New Journalism, which reports on events with the keen eye of a realist
novelist, alert for the details that show how society and character
intersect and collide. He took on the flabby pretensions of modern art
and architecture. And he has championed literary realism, both in
essays and his own novels, as one of the true great achievements of
Western literature, one scorned these days by etiolated critics and
novelists who, skulking in their academic cobwebs, mummify the flies
of their own diseased sensibilities and boring neuroses. While most
intellectuals continue to navel-gaze and wring their hands over the
presumed failures of American civilization, Wolfe has recognized that
historically unprecedented material affluence and sheer freedom have
created an endlessly fascinating and morally instructive world filled
with human variety, absurdity, and heroism.

Hooking Up, soon to be released in paperback, collects a good
selection of Wolfe's essays representing the whole range of his
achievement and his Juvenalian wit. There's reportage covering the two
men who created Silicon Valley and the challenges of the rising
discipline of sociobiology; essays once more dissecting the pomposity
and hypocrisy of academic radicalism and modern art, with a
devastating attack on Norman Mailer, John Irving, and John Updike..
Wolfe's "three stooges" (payback for their peevish criticism of
Wolfe's wildly successful novel A Man in Full); a novella that lays
bare the duplicity, manipulation, faux-liberal politics, and careerism
of 60 Minutes-style television journalism; and a reprise of the 1965
essay that got Wolfe started, "Tiny Mummies!," a withering analysis of
Wallace Shawn and his soporific New Yorker.

All the essays are worth reading, but two in particular will provide
ammunition for those fed up with PC pieties. The introductory essay,
"Hooking Up: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the Second Millennium:
An American's World," is a pretended look back on our world with a
focus on "the average electrician, air-conditioning mechanic, or
burglar-alarm repairman" who "lived a life that would have made the
Sun King blink." America's wealth, the myriad opportunities for
grabbing it, and global military and economic dominance have created
what Saul Bellow calls the "moronic inferno," a public indulgence of
and catering to every sexual whim and material appetite: Everyman as
Trimalchio. You can be an elitist like Bellow and dislike American
culture, but if you really care about the "common man," as the
progressives proclaim to, then you have to love America, the freest,
richest, and most democratic society ever.

Political freedom plus free-market capitalism, Wolfe knows, gives us a
world in which the status aspirations and appetites of the average man
can be realized in all their gaudy, crass glory. The net result is a
relentless egalitarianism as rich and poor alike share the same tastes
and fashions and values, the validation of Plato's old complaint that
radical egalitarianism, the Holy Grail of the PC intellectual, works
only at the level of appetite. Hence rich Park Avenue kids dress and
talk like homey's from the 'hood, and the ex-president behaves like
Snopesian white trash. And this boon of widespread wealth and freedom
and obliteration of class differences was delivered to the working
class not by socialism or communism, but by the intellectuals'
favorite moustache-twirling villain, Capitalism.

As Wolfe points out, however, most of the intellectuals and artists
are missing the whole show. Hidden in their subsidized groves, they
are content to remain an "obedient colony of Europe" and it various
marxiste or modernist or postmodern superstitions. Even when they
notice the outside world, they can understand it only through the
trite formulas and stale gestures of an anti-bourgeois animus. No
wonder that "confused and bored," most Americans tune intellectuals
out and just watch The Simpsons or play computer games and plan their
next vacation.

This disconnect between the dynamic reality of American society and
the fantasies of the intellectuals is Wolfe's topic in "In the Land of
the Rococo Marxists." Wolfe traces historically the development of the
public intellectual into a perpetual whiner and complainer continually
making a spectacle of his own failure of nerve. Fetishizing desiccated
European thinkers, American intellectuals of the twenties missed the
vigor of the United States and its "glow of a young giant: brave,
robust, innocent, and unsophisticated." But "young scribblers, roaring
drunk.. on skepticism, irony, and contempt" ignored these signs of
vitality, preferring to ape the anti-bourgeois bigotry of Europeans.

Throughout the century intellectuals resolutely ignored progress and
improvement, claiming instead to discern the ugly reality unseen by
millions of their oafish fellow citizens hypnotized by consumerism. To
be a famous intellectual, one had to parrot the facile
anti-Americanism and hypocritical anti-Capitalism of people like Susan
Sontag, a pretentious windbag "encumbered by her prose style, which
had a handicapped parking sticker valid at Partisan Review." Nor was
ignorance about the matters she pontificated on a drawback — it was an
absolute requirement. What counted was the display of class
superiority. Knowing America was an oppressive empire was like knowing
which resort to vacation at.

The annus terribilis for the progressive intellectual, of course, was
1989. Chinese dissidents in Tiananmen Square erected a Goddess of
Democracy, eschewing their own traditions for those of the presumably
dysfunctional West. The Soviet Union imploded, opening its archives
and proving correct just about every charge made by every right-wing
nut of the fifties. Vietnam was a puppet of the Soviets and Chinese;
Alger Hiss was guilty; the American Communist Party was a stooge of
Moscow. Worse, a despised America was revealed to have been the
inspiration for all those Eastern European dissidents it was once so
fashionable to fret over. Faced with Marxism's collapse, the
intellectuals dismissed it as "Vulgar Marxism" and invented a new
class of oppressed victims.

The result is what Wolfe calls "Rococo Marxism," the hermeneutics of
suspicion unleashed on behalf of the "new proletariats": "women,
non-whites, put-upon white ethnics, homosexuals, transsexuals, the
polymorphously perverse, pornographers, prostitutes (sex workers),
hardwood trees.. which we can use to express our indignation toward
the powers that be and our aloofness to their bourgeois stooges, to
keep the flame of skepticism, cynicism, irony, and contempt burning."
Hence the ascendancy of Derrida, Foucault et al. and their American
knock-offs like Stanley Fish and Judith Butler. As Wolfe slyly
suggests, however, Fish's Jaguar and scarves and six-figure salary
reveal that, rather than an instrument for dismantling the capitalist
patriarchy, High Theory is just another commodity for the academic
entrepreneur to peddle. In other words, the anti-bourgeois
fundamentalists are as hungry for status and lucre as any Wall-Street
pirate or suburban real-estate agent.

This whole collection is filled with Wolfe's keen-eyed, laugh-out-loud
dissections of cant and hypocrisy. He illustrates what we need more of
in the Culture Wars.. hip, funny, mean commentators who won't let the
other side, themselves quick to hurl question-begging epithets like
"racist" and "sexist," hide behind the skirts of sensitivity and
decorum. We have enough conservatives in the elegant, "Tweedy Prof
mode." We need more warriors like Tom Wolfe who are willing to go
thermonuclear on the commissars and fellow-travelers of intellectual
tyranny.


http://www.nationalreview.com/weekend/books/books-thornton072101.shtml