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

Hooking Up, by Tom Wolfe (Farrar Straus Giroux, 304 pp., $10.40, paperback/October 2001)

urtis 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.