I chanced to reread Radical Chic a few weeks ago and can only support the exhortation that everyone should treat themselves to Wolfe’s magnificent flaying of the insufferably smug liberal elite of years past. History may not exactly repeat itself, but it sure can rhyme!
The parallels with 1968 are in some ways almost too neat. A weakened Democrat incumbent facing off against a Republican who is the most hated man in the world by the left, and Robert Kennedy trying to upset the Democratic primary. And a Democrat convention in Chicago just waiting to turn ugly.
Far out, Man!
Except where can we find a stylist like Tom Wolfe these days?
It's not just finding a Tom Wolfe equivalent, it's finding one that would actually be admitted to the inner circles of the idiot glitterati. As Bari Weiss, Matt Taibbi, Tulsi Gabbard, and other outspoken liberals have illustrated, as soon as you out yourself as someone willing to call things as you see them, you're as good as dead to so-called high society. ("You can't speak your mind in here! We're liberals!")
Indeed. Uri Berliner demonstrated this development so clearly in his remarkably fast ascension ahead of Mr Geller as the most famous Uri of them all.
Although one suspects that reports from the inner circles in 2024 would show a marked degeneration of wit, erudition and eloquence even compared to the fatuousness of the circles orbiting the Bernsteins in 1970.
I chanced to reread Radical Chic a few weeks ago and can only support the exhortation that everyone should treat themselves to Wolfe’s magnificent flaying of the insufferably smug liberal elite of years past. History may not exactly repeat itself, but it sure can rhyme!
The parallels with 1968 are in some ways almost too neat. A weakened Democrat incumbent facing off against a Republican who is the most hated man in the world by the left, and Robert Kennedy trying to upset the Democratic primary. And a Democrat convention in Chicago just waiting to turn ugly.
Far out, Man!
Except where can we find a stylist like Tom Wolfe these days?
It's not just finding a Tom Wolfe equivalent, it's finding one that would actually be admitted to the inner circles of the idiot glitterati. As Bari Weiss, Matt Taibbi, Tulsi Gabbard, and other outspoken liberals have illustrated, as soon as you out yourself as someone willing to call things as you see them, you're as good as dead to so-called high society. ("You can't speak your mind in here! We're liberals!")
Indeed. Uri Berliner demonstrated this development so clearly in his remarkably fast ascension ahead of Mr Geller as the most famous Uri of them all.
Although one suspects that reports from the inner circles in 2024 would show a marked degeneration of wit, erudition and eloquence even compared to the fatuousness of the circles orbiting the Bernsteins in 1970.