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Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers
Two hilarious essays by the author of The Right Stuff show the white liberal establishment confronting the new subculture, with humorous and unexpected results. Reprint.
144 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1970
About the author
Tom Wolfe
143 books3,014 followersWolfe was educated at Washington and Lee Universities and also at Yale, where he received a PhD in American studies.
Tom Wolfe spent his early days as a Washington Post beat reporter, where his free-association, onomatopoetic style would later become the trademark of New Journalism. In books such as The Electric Koolaid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, and The Bonfire of the Vanities, Wolfe delves into the inner workings of the mind, writing about the unconscious decisions people make in their lives. His attention to eccentricities of human behavior and language and to questions of social status are considered unparalleled in the American literary canon.
He is one of the founders of the New Journalism movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
Tom Wolfe is also famous for coining and defining the term fiction-absolute .
http://us.macmillan.com/author/tomwolfe
Tom Wolfe spent his early days as a Washington Post beat reporter, where his free-association, onomatopoetic style would later become the trademark of New Journalism. In books such as The Electric Koolaid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, and The Bonfire of the Vanities, Wolfe delves into the inner workings of the mind, writing about the unconscious decisions people make in their lives. His attention to eccentricities of human behavior and language and to questions of social status are considered unparalleled in the American literary canon.
He is one of the founders of the New Journalism movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
Tom Wolfe is also famous for coining and defining the term fiction-absolute .
http://us.macmillan.com/author/tomwolfe
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April 4, 2016
Tom Wolfe entered the political fray with the two essays in his 1970 book Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. “Radical Chic” describes a fundraiser that Leonard Bernstein and his wife Felicia held at their Park Avenue apartment for the Black Panther Party. Wolfe wasn’t actually invited to the party, but he saw the invitation on David Halberstam’s desk at Harper’s magazine. Halberstam wasn’t in, so Wolfe pocketed the invitation and RSVP’d to the party. Wolfe was struck by the incongruity of the Bernsteins hosting a fundraiser for radical black socialist/communist militants in their two-story, thirteen-room penthouse duplex, and it’s this irony, this inherent satire, that gives “Radical Chic” it’s bite.
At the time the Bernsteins hosted the party, on January 14, 1970, what Wolfe calls “radical chic” was definitely a part of some elements of the liberal culture. It was considered hip and groovy to support very radical political causes. In 1969, various Black Panthers were arrested and accused of trying to blow up a number of buildings in New York City, including that bastion of racism and oppression, the Bronx Botanical Gardens. The party the Bernsteins hosted was to raise money for the defense fund of those Panthers who had been arrested, who were still being held in jail. Don Cox, field marshal of the Black Panthers, spoke at the fundraiser.
Wolfe’s writing is as sharp as a knife throughout the essay: “God, what a flood of taboo thoughts runs through one’s head at these Radical Chic events…But it’s delicious. It is as if one’s nerve endings were on red alert to the most intimate nuances of status.” (p.8) Wolfe is always on red alert to the most intimate nuances of status! That’s his calling card! This is right up his alley!
Tom Wolfe wasn’t the only journalist who was at the fundraiser that evening. Also present was Charlotte Curtis, a reporter from The New York Times who actually captured what’s probably the best-known exchange of the evening, between Cox and Leonard Bernstein:
“’If business won't give us full employment, then we must take the means of production and put them in the hands of the people.’
'I dig absolutely,' Mr. Bernstein said.''
Curtis’ article on the party was published the next day in the Times, and the party was considered so intriguing that a few days later a Times editorial was published about it, attacking the Bernsteins for hosting such a radical organization. Felicia Bernstein then wrote a long letter to the Times defending their hosting of the event, and protesting the fact that it was reported as a “party.” The Bernsteins split hairs by saying that the fundraiser was really for the defense fund of the accused Panthers, and that it was all about free speech rather than backing everything that the Panthers stood for. You can make that argument, but why not just give money to, say, the ACLU if you’re so concerned about the Panthers’ civil liberties?
The whole event became something of a media circus, as pundits from both political sides weighed in on the party. Wolfe was quoted in Curtis’ 1987 obituary in the Times, saying, ''It wasn't anything she wrote that infuriated them. It was that she put down exactly what they said. That's always what seems cruelest of all, to hold up a mirror to people that way.''
Wolfe’s own article, titled “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s,” was published in June, 1970, in New York magazine. Don Cox was not happy about Wolfe’s article, as related in his 2011 New York Times obituary:
“He added that ‘it was those media freaks and that bloodsucking Tom Wolfe’ who exploited the cause of black liberation to make money from it and ‘to be part of the machinery that tried to ridiculize {sic} it.’” According to the obituary, “Cox was charged as a conspirator in the July 1969 murder of Eugene Anderson, a Panther who had been a police informer in Baltimore.” Cox left the United States when a warrant was issued for his arrest and never returned.
On the official Leonard Bernstein website, run by Bernstein’s estate, there is a lengthy section on the “radical chic flap,” which is quite an interesting read.
Wolfe had some difficulty in writing the essay, and in a 1980 interview he said: “I started writing in the first person, which was a big mistake, telling how I saw this invitation, how I wrangled my way in. I wrote about thirty pages like that, and then it dawned on me that it was useless information and really detracted from the scene, which was the important thing.” (Conversations with Tom Wolfe, p.136)
Wolfe was criticized for not taking a political stand of his own in “Radical Chic,” and like other works of Wolfe’s, critics at the time used him as a tabula rasa to imprint their own feelings about what Wolfe’s politics might be. Appearing on William F. Buckley’s show Firing Line in December 1970, shortly after Radical Chic was released, Wolfe spoke about the role of the writer, saying, “The real contribution of a writer is not to make the moral point, it is to discover. I think of a lot of moralistic writing as a moral cop-out. If you have your mind made up, or if you have a cause in mind, why should I really wear myself out gathering evidence when we already know the conclusion? This is the greatest vice of journalism in our time.”
The point of “Radical Chic” is not that you learn about Tom Wolfe’s own political point of view. He’s a reporter, not an editorialist. If he had presented the book from a liberal point of view, liberal critics at the time would have cheered, but would the book have been valuable? Or would it have just been preaching to the choir? Likewise, had he written the book from a conservative point of view, liberal critics would have just attacked him because he was taking a conservative viewpoint. By making the book not have an editorial point of view, Wolfe ultimately wrote a better book. He leaves it up to the readers to come to their own conclusions.
Every work of art doesn’t have to be political. But the late 1960’s and the early 1970’s were an extremely political time-in the lingo of the time, you’re either with us or against us, part of the solution or part of the problem. We live in a similar time now, when every decision people make seems to be politically informed, or is thought to somehow be a window onto one’s politics.
“Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers” describes how various minorities groups in San Francisco would intimidate government programs into giving them money. Wolfe calls the process “mau-mauing,” after the Mau Mau Rebellion that took place in Kenya in the 1950’s. Wolfe is superb as he shows how a combination of bureaucratic ineptitude and white guilt combined to give money to groups who might not have been pursuing the agendas of the anti-poverty programs.
My favorite part of “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers” is Wolfe’s description of the “flak catcher,” the government employee who takes the heat, or catches the flak, from the minority groups:
“All you have to do is look at him and you get the picture. The man’s a lifer. He’s stone civil service. He has it all down from the wheatcolor Hush Puppies to the wash’n’dry semi-tab-collar shortsleeved white shirt. Those wheatcolor Hush Puppies must be like some kind of fraternal garb among the civil-service employees, because they all wear them. They cost about $4.99, and the second time you move your toes, the seams split and the tops come away from the soles. But they all wear them.” (p.93) Wolfe is so good at painting such a vivid picture of a person by just using a few key details like that.
In his profile of Wolfe in the November 2015 issue of Vanity Fair, Michael Lewis described the experience of reading Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers when he was 11 or 12 years old:
“At some point came a thought that struck with the force of revelation: this book had been written by someone. Some human being must have sat down and scribbled the Hardy Boys series, along with the Legends of the NFL-how else would I have ever known that Dallas Cowboys defensive lineman Bob Lilly lifted a Volkswagen by himself? I’d never really stopped to ask who had written any of those books, because…well, because it didn’t matter to me who had written them. Their creators were invisible. They had no particular identity. No voice. Now rolling around a living-room floor in New Orleans, Louisiana, howling with laughter, I asked a new question: Who wrote this book?”
Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers is one of Tom Wolfe’s essential books, and Wolfe once said in 1987, “As a piece of sheer writing, it’s my favorite book.” (Conversations with Tom Wolfe, p.213) It's a terrific read, with a very strong authorial voice.
At the time the Bernsteins hosted the party, on January 14, 1970, what Wolfe calls “radical chic” was definitely a part of some elements of the liberal culture. It was considered hip and groovy to support very radical political causes. In 1969, various Black Panthers were arrested and accused of trying to blow up a number of buildings in New York City, including that bastion of racism and oppression, the Bronx Botanical Gardens. The party the Bernsteins hosted was to raise money for the defense fund of those Panthers who had been arrested, who were still being held in jail. Don Cox, field marshal of the Black Panthers, spoke at the fundraiser.
Wolfe’s writing is as sharp as a knife throughout the essay: “God, what a flood of taboo thoughts runs through one’s head at these Radical Chic events…But it’s delicious. It is as if one’s nerve endings were on red alert to the most intimate nuances of status.” (p.8) Wolfe is always on red alert to the most intimate nuances of status! That’s his calling card! This is right up his alley!
Tom Wolfe wasn’t the only journalist who was at the fundraiser that evening. Also present was Charlotte Curtis, a reporter from The New York Times who actually captured what’s probably the best-known exchange of the evening, between Cox and Leonard Bernstein:
“’If business won't give us full employment, then we must take the means of production and put them in the hands of the people.’
'I dig absolutely,' Mr. Bernstein said.''
Curtis’ article on the party was published the next day in the Times, and the party was considered so intriguing that a few days later a Times editorial was published about it, attacking the Bernsteins for hosting such a radical organization. Felicia Bernstein then wrote a long letter to the Times defending their hosting of the event, and protesting the fact that it was reported as a “party.” The Bernsteins split hairs by saying that the fundraiser was really for the defense fund of the accused Panthers, and that it was all about free speech rather than backing everything that the Panthers stood for. You can make that argument, but why not just give money to, say, the ACLU if you’re so concerned about the Panthers’ civil liberties?
The whole event became something of a media circus, as pundits from both political sides weighed in on the party. Wolfe was quoted in Curtis’ 1987 obituary in the Times, saying, ''It wasn't anything she wrote that infuriated them. It was that she put down exactly what they said. That's always what seems cruelest of all, to hold up a mirror to people that way.''
Wolfe’s own article, titled “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s,” was published in June, 1970, in New York magazine. Don Cox was not happy about Wolfe’s article, as related in his 2011 New York Times obituary:
“He added that ‘it was those media freaks and that bloodsucking Tom Wolfe’ who exploited the cause of black liberation to make money from it and ‘to be part of the machinery that tried to ridiculize {sic} it.’” According to the obituary, “Cox was charged as a conspirator in the July 1969 murder of Eugene Anderson, a Panther who had been a police informer in Baltimore.” Cox left the United States when a warrant was issued for his arrest and never returned.
On the official Leonard Bernstein website, run by Bernstein’s estate, there is a lengthy section on the “radical chic flap,” which is quite an interesting read.
Wolfe had some difficulty in writing the essay, and in a 1980 interview he said: “I started writing in the first person, which was a big mistake, telling how I saw this invitation, how I wrangled my way in. I wrote about thirty pages like that, and then it dawned on me that it was useless information and really detracted from the scene, which was the important thing.” (Conversations with Tom Wolfe, p.136)
Wolfe was criticized for not taking a political stand of his own in “Radical Chic,” and like other works of Wolfe’s, critics at the time used him as a tabula rasa to imprint their own feelings about what Wolfe’s politics might be. Appearing on William F. Buckley’s show Firing Line in December 1970, shortly after Radical Chic was released, Wolfe spoke about the role of the writer, saying, “The real contribution of a writer is not to make the moral point, it is to discover. I think of a lot of moralistic writing as a moral cop-out. If you have your mind made up, or if you have a cause in mind, why should I really wear myself out gathering evidence when we already know the conclusion? This is the greatest vice of journalism in our time.”
The point of “Radical Chic” is not that you learn about Tom Wolfe’s own political point of view. He’s a reporter, not an editorialist. If he had presented the book from a liberal point of view, liberal critics at the time would have cheered, but would the book have been valuable? Or would it have just been preaching to the choir? Likewise, had he written the book from a conservative point of view, liberal critics would have just attacked him because he was taking a conservative viewpoint. By making the book not have an editorial point of view, Wolfe ultimately wrote a better book. He leaves it up to the readers to come to their own conclusions.
Every work of art doesn’t have to be political. But the late 1960’s and the early 1970’s were an extremely political time-in the lingo of the time, you’re either with us or against us, part of the solution or part of the problem. We live in a similar time now, when every decision people make seems to be politically informed, or is thought to somehow be a window onto one’s politics.
“Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers” describes how various minorities groups in San Francisco would intimidate government programs into giving them money. Wolfe calls the process “mau-mauing,” after the Mau Mau Rebellion that took place in Kenya in the 1950’s. Wolfe is superb as he shows how a combination of bureaucratic ineptitude and white guilt combined to give money to groups who might not have been pursuing the agendas of the anti-poverty programs.
My favorite part of “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers” is Wolfe’s description of the “flak catcher,” the government employee who takes the heat, or catches the flak, from the minority groups:
“All you have to do is look at him and you get the picture. The man’s a lifer. He’s stone civil service. He has it all down from the wheatcolor Hush Puppies to the wash’n’dry semi-tab-collar shortsleeved white shirt. Those wheatcolor Hush Puppies must be like some kind of fraternal garb among the civil-service employees, because they all wear them. They cost about $4.99, and the second time you move your toes, the seams split and the tops come away from the soles. But they all wear them.” (p.93) Wolfe is so good at painting such a vivid picture of a person by just using a few key details like that.
In his profile of Wolfe in the November 2015 issue of Vanity Fair, Michael Lewis described the experience of reading Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers when he was 11 or 12 years old:
“At some point came a thought that struck with the force of revelation: this book had been written by someone. Some human being must have sat down and scribbled the Hardy Boys series, along with the Legends of the NFL-how else would I have ever known that Dallas Cowboys defensive lineman Bob Lilly lifted a Volkswagen by himself? I’d never really stopped to ask who had written any of those books, because…well, because it didn’t matter to me who had written them. Their creators were invisible. They had no particular identity. No voice. Now rolling around a living-room floor in New Orleans, Louisiana, howling with laughter, I asked a new question: Who wrote this book?”
Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers is one of Tom Wolfe’s essential books, and Wolfe once said in 1987, “As a piece of sheer writing, it’s my favorite book.” (Conversations with Tom Wolfe, p.213) It's a terrific read, with a very strong authorial voice.
Read
June 5, 2020This is a rather disturbing read considering what is currently happening in the States. First published in 1970, these two essays ponder the dynamics of white guilt: The term „radical chic“ describes the impulse of rich and famous people to endorse progressive or even radical causes, but not (or not solely) out of conviction, but rather to underline their status, curate their image and indulge in virtue signalling – at the core, radical chic is a form of sublimated decadence. Wolfe’s text describes a fundraising party composer Leonard Bernstein actually threw for the Black Panthers.
In „Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers“, Wolfe reports from the Office of Economic Opportunity in San Francisco. It portrays how thugs pressure and threaten public officials and thus manage to render the anti-poverty programs largely inefficient.
While Wolfe does point out some real problems, he is also stupidly smug in his self-assured privileged position, unable to show sufficient empathy for those who can't just eat cake and vanish to the Hamptons because the system he profits from strategically disenfranchises them, and representatives of this system can still murder them with impunity. At the moment, I’m so rattled, furious and sad that I don’t feel like I’m able to weigh Wolfe’s arguments or properly comment – I’m just overwhelmed by the fact that discussions go on over decades and decades and don’t seem to move forward one single bit: Systemic racism, white privilege, and poverty on the rise. How can that be? Yesterday, the headline of a big national newspaper in Germany read „Trump declares war on America“. Just let that sink in.
In „Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers“, Wolfe reports from the Office of Economic Opportunity in San Francisco. It portrays how thugs pressure and threaten public officials and thus manage to render the anti-poverty programs largely inefficient.
While Wolfe does point out some real problems, he is also stupidly smug in his self-assured privileged position, unable to show sufficient empathy for those who can't just eat cake and vanish to the Hamptons because the system he profits from strategically disenfranchises them, and representatives of this system can still murder them with impunity. At the moment, I’m so rattled, furious and sad that I don’t feel like I’m able to weigh Wolfe’s arguments or properly comment – I’m just overwhelmed by the fact that discussions go on over decades and decades and don’t seem to move forward one single bit: Systemic racism, white privilege, and poverty on the rise. How can that be? Yesterday, the headline of a big national newspaper in Germany read „Trump declares war on America“. Just let that sink in.
May 3, 2007
Still valid. Still extremely valid. Still so valid that you can see parallels of everything described in the book in regular life. I'm not a new your socialite, but the idea of radical chic applies to most every cause today. I do see group organizers on a regular basis, and they mau-mau as much as ever.
January 24, 2009
Tom Wolfe, full of snark. Wolfe's best work The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, the early Esquire stories centers on character who he clearly admires. He's often called a great observer, but in truth, he's always been a better king-maker. More and more, Wolfe's tendency is to attack what he doesn't really understand. At this point, he presents himself as an aging, out-of-touch buffoon decrying oral sex and extolling the virtues of the Scotch-Irish.
"Radical Chic" is one of Wolfe's first forays into the hatchet job genre that ended up destroying his work. This one, however, is a lot of fun to read, mostly because Wolfe knows the turf (New York's media world) so well. As in Wolfe's best work, the scenes are dynamic, the prose ecstatic, and the narrative a locomotive. The only place where it goes seriously off the rails is in Wolfe's choice of a target. Instead of picking on people his own size (Bernstein, Preminger), Wolfe saves his knockout punches for New York society wives--among the easiest targets in the history of world literature. His ire may be warranted, but picking on the quietly suffering Felicia Bernstein so mercilessly feels like plain bullying.
"Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers" foreshadows the out-of-touch vitriol that would come to define Wolfe's journalism. He deploys his gifts lazily and doesn't take the time to really get to know any of the characters. It's moralism and finger-wagging judgment even as Wolfe throws off enough flourishes to keep us reading.
February 12, 2018
Tom Wolfe is a genius writer in the pantheon of Hemingway. He devised the term "limosine liberal" and of course "Radical Chic". Remarkably this book reads like it was written in 2016 in the thrust of liberalism, social media, and political correctness. But it was written in 1970! Far ahead of its time and one could say Wolfe characterized the first seedlings of political correctness with that sapling planted in the late 60s. Who knows, if social media existed then the same nonsense happening today would have happened then in the media (fake news etc). Radical Chic exists in full force today with left wing celebrities jumping on any liberal bandwagon for relevance and attention: LGBQWRST, BLM, etc. Frivolous political agitators describes Madonna at the "Women's March" describing her thoughts of "often blowing up the White House", Rosie O'Donnell, The View, Ashley Judd etc.
Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers is also ahead of its time describing San Francisco city politics and graft. Apply that to any democrap run city like Chicago. It reads like Chicago today. The gem was Wolfe (mind you this is 1970) as the ultimate job for someone with no skills and ability but a great way to make money is being a "Community Organizer". Do we know any "community organizers" that rose to prominence but never really accomplished anything in the private sector (even in the law)? You make money on both sides being a community organizer. It is almost like a legally required job so the local government can have a chump on the take to keep the people from revolting while the people think they have a person representing their voice. In the meantime the community organizer profits on both sides doing really nothing and not needing skills (apart from conman skills) to do the job.
Vigorously hilarious and distinctive Tom Wolfe genius.
Wikipedia: adoption and promotion of radical political causes by celebrities, socialites, and high society. The concept has been described as "an exercise in double-tracking one's public image: on the one hand, defining oneself through committed allegiance to a radical cause, but on the other, vitally, demonstrating this allegiance because it is the fashionable, au courant way to be seen in moneyed, name-conscious Society."[2] Unlike dedicated activists, revolutionaries, or dissenters, those who engage in "radical chic" remain frivolous political agitators. They are ideologically invested in their cause of choice only so far as it advances their social standing.
Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers is also ahead of its time describing San Francisco city politics and graft. Apply that to any democrap run city like Chicago. It reads like Chicago today. The gem was Wolfe (mind you this is 1970) as the ultimate job for someone with no skills and ability but a great way to make money is being a "Community Organizer". Do we know any "community organizers" that rose to prominence but never really accomplished anything in the private sector (even in the law)? You make money on both sides being a community organizer. It is almost like a legally required job so the local government can have a chump on the take to keep the people from revolting while the people think they have a person representing their voice. In the meantime the community organizer profits on both sides doing really nothing and not needing skills (apart from conman skills) to do the job.
Vigorously hilarious and distinctive Tom Wolfe genius.
Wikipedia: adoption and promotion of radical political causes by celebrities, socialites, and high society. The concept has been described as "an exercise in double-tracking one's public image: on the one hand, defining oneself through committed allegiance to a radical cause, but on the other, vitally, demonstrating this allegiance because it is the fashionable, au courant way to be seen in moneyed, name-conscious Society."[2] Unlike dedicated activists, revolutionaries, or dissenters, those who engage in "radical chic" remain frivolous political agitators. They are ideologically invested in their cause of choice only so far as it advances their social standing.
March 4, 2019
Picked this up yesterday for a quarter. It is an interesting document--one of many which signified a new journalism, a creative nonfiction. My only reason for reading this was the focus on Leonard Bernstein, or at least on his apartment. As Lenorard's daughter noted, he had a weaponized ego-- and such is truly prominent here. Wolfe gives us a satire but one with such a flat affect that conservatives love it.
January 5, 2009
I found a hardbound first edition of Radical Chic and Mau Mauing the Flak Catchers in a used-book barn in rural Pennsylvania over the holidays (unfortunately without the cartoonish book jacket). It gave me an opportunity to re-read these two magazine articles, a 130-page snapshot of late 1960s liberal society written in Wolfe's "new journalism" style ("radical" itself). This quick read is such a hoot for anyone who came of age in the '60s. For those younger, it offers a different point-of-view than your history books and an introduction to Wolfe's tongue-in-cheek non-fiction style.
June 15, 2007
An absolute character assasination of the would be hip, open minded, liberal left wing. Reinforces "the more things change......" This is as true of an indictment today as it was 37 years ago
November 21, 2022
Freaking gold. What an absolute gas. A stone groove. Classic pulse of the 1970s. Radical Chic sets the scene, and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers delivers. It takes it home.
Nostalgie de la boue is a thing, or should I say thang. Nostalgie de la boue, as a term was coined in 1855 by Émile Augier in France. An eternal human instinct that found fertile ground after World War Two, in America. America? Yes America. Think about it. It flourishes in prosperity. The '50s and '60s it found its light in the Arts and the zeitgeist in the 1970s. Nostalgie de la boue is referenced in Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, (1971) and in Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow, (1975).
Nostalgie de la boue, taking a leading role in Western Culture and the Arts is ironic timing for early in the Cold War.
Nostalgie de la boue is a thing, or should I say thang. Nostalgie de la boue, as a term was coined in 1855 by Émile Augier in France. An eternal human instinct that found fertile ground after World War Two, in America. America? Yes America. Think about it. It flourishes in prosperity. The '50s and '60s it found its light in the Arts and the zeitgeist in the 1970s. Nostalgie de la boue is referenced in Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, (1971) and in Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow, (1975).
Nostalgie de la boue, taking a leading role in Western Culture and the Arts is ironic timing for early in the Cold War.
August 11, 2019
26 Nov. 2018 - I just noticed someone using the term "Mau-Mauing" and it brought back wonderful memories of the essay in this little book by Tom Wolfe that I read in the 70s, probably not too many years after it was published in 1970.
What a great journalist Wolfe was. Catching just the right nuances of memorable foolish traits of various people and groups. The people Mau-Maued in this case are hapless SF welfare bureaucrats. The Radical Chic fool was the great conductor and composer, but totally politically misguided, Leonard Bernstein, hosting a party for the Black Panthers in his NY penthouse (if I remember correctly after 45+ years).
Both essays in this book are excellent, super satirical and highly recommended.
What a great journalist Wolfe was. Catching just the right nuances of memorable foolish traits of various people and groups. The people Mau-Maued in this case are hapless SF welfare bureaucrats. The Radical Chic fool was the great conductor and composer, but totally politically misguided, Leonard Bernstein, hosting a party for the Black Panthers in his NY penthouse (if I remember correctly after 45+ years).
Both essays in this book are excellent, super satirical and highly recommended.
May 15, 2024
-A collection of two famous long-form essay pieces from a father of New Journalism.
It is darkly amusing that in the half-century since the publication of Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, American elites and associated aspirants have made "Radical Chic" a modus operandi. If only, we still had Tom Wolfe around to savage them like he savaged the Bernsteins. This isn't to say not that the elect today don't receive deserved savaging, but the level of noise in our public discourse obscures rather than highlights this. The strategy of elites co-opting radical aesthetics while hollowing out the radical political agenda has an exquisite hilarity. Our ongoing "culture war" helps distract from who benefits and how they benefit from our current array of salient memes and poisonous cotton-candy rhetoric. All this underscores how far afield Marxoid activism has drifted away from material concerns due to a lack of material anxieties.
This phenomenon, elites (or those adjacent to them) larping as activists and socialists etc, has matured and broadened a bit and with it the terminology: "luxury beliefs," "woke capitalism," "slacktivism," "oppression olympics," etc. To this end, the large-scale adoption has been so total and so obnoxious that we're likely riding the downslope (God-willing) or approaching the acme of "Radical Chic." If I had to guess, I'd say the election of Donald Trump was a watershed event somewhere in this timeline, if not THE "Jump the Shark" moment. There is of course the other possibility that this mode enduringly remains the dominant mode of cultural signaling and public/private prestige accrual available to those who wish to stay in or ascend through polite society.
On top of this, not only are our current low-level bureaucratic operators, the "flak catchers," still susceptible to "mau-mauing" (now "cancellation" or online mobbing since the physical public square has deteriorated), but also almost anyone with an online presence and a desire to be seen as good people by their purported cultural betters (i.e. elites and tastemakers with progressive values).
Wolfe was incredibly perceptive to identify and satirize this cultural mode, and these essays should be assigned reading in college rhetoric/communication/composition courses more frequently.
It is darkly amusing that in the half-century since the publication of Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, American elites and associated aspirants have made "Radical Chic" a modus operandi. If only, we still had Tom Wolfe around to savage them like he savaged the Bernsteins. This isn't to say not that the elect today don't receive deserved savaging, but the level of noise in our public discourse obscures rather than highlights this. The strategy of elites co-opting radical aesthetics while hollowing out the radical political agenda has an exquisite hilarity. Our ongoing "culture war" helps distract from who benefits and how they benefit from our current array of salient memes and poisonous cotton-candy rhetoric. All this underscores how far afield Marxoid activism has drifted away from material concerns due to a lack of material anxieties.
This phenomenon, elites (or those adjacent to them) larping as activists and socialists etc, has matured and broadened a bit and with it the terminology: "luxury beliefs," "woke capitalism," "slacktivism," "oppression olympics," etc. To this end, the large-scale adoption has been so total and so obnoxious that we're likely riding the downslope (God-willing) or approaching the acme of "Radical Chic." If I had to guess, I'd say the election of Donald Trump was a watershed event somewhere in this timeline, if not THE "Jump the Shark" moment. There is of course the other possibility that this mode enduringly remains the dominant mode of cultural signaling and public/private prestige accrual available to those who wish to stay in or ascend through polite society.
On top of this, not only are our current low-level bureaucratic operators, the "flak catchers," still susceptible to "mau-mauing" (now "cancellation" or online mobbing since the physical public square has deteriorated), but also almost anyone with an online presence and a desire to be seen as good people by their purported cultural betters (i.e. elites and tastemakers with progressive values).
Wolfe was incredibly perceptive to identify and satirize this cultural mode, and these essays should be assigned reading in college rhetoric/communication/composition courses more frequently.
September 14, 2007
The prejudices are clear - purportedly and expose about the hypocrisies of Upper-East-Side armchair liberalism, the author's voice clearly belongs to the crowd he criticizes. But nonetheless a hilarious, insightful piece of living history.
March 2, 2019
Videorecensione: https://youtu.be/cx5XfwYOx5Q
September 16, 2023
I read this to greater understand the true meaning behind ‘radical chic’ in a moment of heightened use of the term around me. The writing is gossipy and journalistic - which I enjoyed, with frequent cultural references to upper class New York society - more boring. I think the message of lampooning the very rich for their infatuation with social causes to uplift their own position in society is generally good since the social causes are not for them. However, I found the writing about the Black Panthers troubling. Their genuine struggle against racist capitalism is dismissed for the purpose of criticising the rich. I only skimmed the second essay in this book, because I found it worse than the first in its demeaning tone towards black people living in poverty.
August 9, 2007
This is a series of vignettes of American culture in the 60's and 70's. I loved Mau-mauing the flak catchers. The flak catchers were government bureaucrats at the interface of public programs for the poor and the actual poor. One local entrepreneur ran a school to teach the biggest, strongest, most aggressive blacks to terrorize (or Mau-Mau) these people and thereby convince the flakies that they were the "natural leaders" of the oppressed community, and would therefore receive the most government money. The description of the giant Samoans, and their impact on all concerned, was hysterical.
January 27, 2010
"Radical Chic," the first long-form essay in this book tells the almost-too-good-to-be-true of Leonard Bernstein's soiree for his fellow New York glitterati and several key members of the Black Panther Party at his Park Avenue duplex. Wolfe's tone is about what you would expect. A hilarious, biting take on white guilt and the unbridled hypocrisy (temporarily replacing your long-time black servants with Latino servants so to appear more progressive, e.g.)resulting when revolution becomes fashionable.
"Mau Mau-ing The Flack Catchers" is more dated and isn't as good of a read, but "Radical Chic" is completely worth it.
"Mau Mau-ing The Flack Catchers" is more dated and isn't as good of a read, but "Radical Chic" is completely worth it.
June 3, 2007
Had to read this for class too. I think his writing is flamboyent. In terms of content I really enjoyed it. I thought he was really writing about how everyone ignores the working classes. But for class we only discussed craft. Amazing how this style of writing only occurred in the sixties, it's kind of dated that way. If people were to write like this now, well some people do and when they do I find it cloying.
December 11, 2009
Great stuff... Wolfe is a little bit of everything: Gonzo and independent in terms of journalism, satirical and accusatory in his attacks, libertarian and counter-culture in principle.
May 22, 2018
It's a tiny bit arrogant of people to go around worrying about those less fortunate.
—Whit Stillman, Metropolitan
Stop me if you've heard this one before: it is a year or two into a conservative presidential administration—one that follows an epoch-making liberal one, and that was carried into office on a wave of resentful white populism. Social and cultural changes that once looked permanent now feel a bit insecure. An alliance between the cultural and economic elite with progressive causes, including some of those causes' more radical exponents, starts to break. Satire overwhelms earnestness. The ideological and demographic constituencies of the broad political left itself begin to fall out: socialist vs. liberal, working class vs. middle class, African-American vs. Jewish. The ethical status of the state of Israel is a particular flashpoint. And the New York Times increasingly appears to side, at least in matters cultural, with the political right.
Is this America? Is this 2018? It is indeed America, but I am describing the Nixon years, and you can read all about it in the late Tom Wolfe's 1970 classic of embedded and excitable reportage, "Radical Chic." The titular phrase, by the way, is one—among others—that Wolfe introduced into the language; it signifies the temporary adoption of left-wing ideology by the rich as a matter of fashion. (The word woke now means roughly the same, at least in its ironic usage, where it is spoken in imagined quotation marks to suggest a privileged white liberal's patronizing adoption of black slang.)
Upon the white-suited author's recent death, I wanted to read something of his, preferably not a 900-page novel in the mode of a zany Zola, so I chose this diptych on hearing "Radical Chic" commended on social media as especially relevant to the politics of the present. I just didn't realize how relevant it would prove, even though I am the one always saying history is likely more circle than line.
"Radical Chic" famously narrates a party and/or meeting and/or benefit (the nature of the gathering actually becomes a point of contention in its controversial aftermath) held in the home of celebrated conductor Leonard Bernstein in 1970 wherein he hosted a number of Black Panthers alongside his more customary guest list of VIPs (Otto Preminger, Barbara Walters, Harry Belafonte—to cite a few names still in circulation). The event itself goes awry when Bernstein and his cohort begin interrogating their new guests not so much on racial politics, but rather on the Panthers' avowed revolutionary goal of overthrowing capitalism—obviously an unwelcome prospect to this gathering of the haute bourgeoisie. Further, there is the tense subtext of worsening relations between the black and Jewish communities, exacerbated by the Panthers' Third Worldist politics and concomitant hostility to Israel. When a columnist somewhat mockingly reports on the party in the New York Times the next day, it becomes a watchword for the delusions of fashionable bien pensance at the end of the 1960s.
While Wolfe artfully restricts his narrative timeline to the present of Bernstein's party and its immediate aftermath, his own authorial voice ranges through the history of status wars between old and new money in New York City. Because America has no landed aristocracy, Wolfe explains, there are always new rich emerging from new bases of wealth (railroads, oil, steel, etc.) who need to set themselves apart with new status symbols. Often this takes the form of nostalgie de la boue, or "romanticizing of primitive souls"—essentially, slumming. Making matters more complicated, the new rich of the midcentury, who made their millions in media and culture, come from the ranks of the formerly impoverished immigrant groups: they are Catholics and Jews. These groups, especially the latter, have an understandable historical connection to the political left without compare among previous Protestant cohorts of the new rich. For this reason, they are especially divided between their self-interest and their desire for social justice, and are accordingly susceptible to radical chic, a fundamentally dishonest way of reconciling these incompatible commitments, and one moreover accompanied by an exploitative aestheticization or fetishization, even a consumption, necessarily de haut en bas, of the objects of their pity:
Now Wolfe could not explicate this history and its results so knowledgeably without some sympathy for the subjects of his investigation. His attitude is not simply one of contempt; there is too much understanding in it for that. But there is satire, especially in the piece's opening explanation of how Bernstein and friends clamored to hire white (largely Hispanic) rather than black servants in preparation for their encounter with the Black Panthers.
Wolfe largely spares the Black Panthers themselves his satirical scrutiny. I suspect he sees them as honest political players, pursuing their interests in the open sans the complex codes of the comme il faut among the jet set, codes that often operate precisely to conceal conflicts of interest. In the slighter second piece in this volume, "Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers," he is more unsparing, and here his conservative politics come to the fore as he presents an elaborate game between community organizers and poverty programs in San Francisco. The staid bureaucrats, he explains, require the organizers to intimidate and harass them to justify getting anything done, though what they bring to the communities they ostensibly serve is often make-work amounting to little. Wolfe allows that this characteristic exchange of administrative liberalism helps to bring self-reliance to otherwise desperate constituencies, but here his scorn is withering, especially in his depiction of a climactic parade through the gilded and marble City Hall of children, grotesquely eating junk food, headed by an organizer in a dashiki.
But if "Radical Chic" helped me to understand aspects of elite media in the Age of Trump, "Mau-Mauing" helped me to understand why the last president—himself a former community organizer—often implored his audiences to push his ostensibly moderate government toward more radical goals; according to Wolfe, this is a longstanding technique for change in urban politics. While "Radical Chic" exhibits a certain tact in writing about the Black Panthers that prevents the piece's satire from lapsing into racist invective, though, "Mau-Mauing"—with its eponymous mocking allusion to anti-colonial revolt—does no such thing: its author is the anthropologist as insult artist, and the field report is acidly cartoonish, even if written with contemptuous relish.
The progression in this book, then, is the one narrated by this book: a rightward shift, a growing impatience with the attempt to display sympathies whose honest extension would mean your own undoing. It is true that this can be a cold and unfeeling doctrine, a Nietzschean call to the right of might, but on the other hand at least it does not have that particular reek of hypocrisy. And anyway, Wolfe seems to suggest in his relatively respectful allowance of voice and distance to the Black Panthers, better an open conflict of interests than the cheat that is the power-play of pity. Wolfe's own justly celebrated writing style, its dandiacal energy unimpeded by guilt or condescension, is the literary correlate of such an aristocratic politics.
The effect of Wolfe's satire against the high-low alliance made by radical chic is to shield the middle classes, the "silent majority," from the scorn of the cultural elite and the anger of the insurgent oppressed; yet Wolfe is certainly not of this middle realm himself. His overture to them—like so many we see today—is possibly only another unworkable and hypocritical partnership across the line dividing the cultural haves from the have-nots. As Flaubert claimed he was Emma Bovary even as he anatomized her delusions, so Wolfe might have to acknowledge a kinship with Leonard Bernstein. But I doubt the maestro is the doppelgänger Wolfe would have chosen out of his own text. Perhaps as he gazed across Bernstein's parlor, over the heads of the cringing liberals, he saw—in a moment of nostalgie all his own—the Field Marshal of the Black Panther Party as his own self-image in photo negative: the stylish warrior.
—Whit Stillman, Metropolitan
Stop me if you've heard this one before: it is a year or two into a conservative presidential administration—one that follows an epoch-making liberal one, and that was carried into office on a wave of resentful white populism. Social and cultural changes that once looked permanent now feel a bit insecure. An alliance between the cultural and economic elite with progressive causes, including some of those causes' more radical exponents, starts to break. Satire overwhelms earnestness. The ideological and demographic constituencies of the broad political left itself begin to fall out: socialist vs. liberal, working class vs. middle class, African-American vs. Jewish. The ethical status of the state of Israel is a particular flashpoint. And the New York Times increasingly appears to side, at least in matters cultural, with the political right.
Is this America? Is this 2018? It is indeed America, but I am describing the Nixon years, and you can read all about it in the late Tom Wolfe's 1970 classic of embedded and excitable reportage, "Radical Chic." The titular phrase, by the way, is one—among others—that Wolfe introduced into the language; it signifies the temporary adoption of left-wing ideology by the rich as a matter of fashion. (The word woke now means roughly the same, at least in its ironic usage, where it is spoken in imagined quotation marks to suggest a privileged white liberal's patronizing adoption of black slang.)
Upon the white-suited author's recent death, I wanted to read something of his, preferably not a 900-page novel in the mode of a zany Zola, so I chose this diptych on hearing "Radical Chic" commended on social media as especially relevant to the politics of the present. I just didn't realize how relevant it would prove, even though I am the one always saying history is likely more circle than line.
"Radical Chic" famously narrates a party and/or meeting and/or benefit (the nature of the gathering actually becomes a point of contention in its controversial aftermath) held in the home of celebrated conductor Leonard Bernstein in 1970 wherein he hosted a number of Black Panthers alongside his more customary guest list of VIPs (Otto Preminger, Barbara Walters, Harry Belafonte—to cite a few names still in circulation). The event itself goes awry when Bernstein and his cohort begin interrogating their new guests not so much on racial politics, but rather on the Panthers' avowed revolutionary goal of overthrowing capitalism—obviously an unwelcome prospect to this gathering of the haute bourgeoisie. Further, there is the tense subtext of worsening relations between the black and Jewish communities, exacerbated by the Panthers' Third Worldist politics and concomitant hostility to Israel. When a columnist somewhat mockingly reports on the party in the New York Times the next day, it becomes a watchword for the delusions of fashionable bien pensance at the end of the 1960s.
While Wolfe artfully restricts his narrative timeline to the present of Bernstein's party and its immediate aftermath, his own authorial voice ranges through the history of status wars between old and new money in New York City. Because America has no landed aristocracy, Wolfe explains, there are always new rich emerging from new bases of wealth (railroads, oil, steel, etc.) who need to set themselves apart with new status symbols. Often this takes the form of nostalgie de la boue, or "romanticizing of primitive souls"—essentially, slumming. Making matters more complicated, the new rich of the midcentury, who made their millions in media and culture, come from the ranks of the formerly impoverished immigrant groups: they are Catholics and Jews. These groups, especially the latter, have an understandable historical connection to the political left without compare among previous Protestant cohorts of the new rich. For this reason, they are especially divided between their self-interest and their desire for social justice, and are accordingly susceptible to radical chic, a fundamentally dishonest way of reconciling these incompatible commitments, and one moreover accompanied by an exploitative aestheticization or fetishization, even a consumption, necessarily de haut en bas, of the objects of their pity:
These are no civil-rights Negroes wearing gray suits three sizes too big—Radical chic is the anti-racism that is really just racism.
—no more interminable Urban League banquets in hotel ballrooms where they try to alternate the blacks and whites around the tables as if they were stringing Arapaho beads—
—these are real men!
Shootouts, revolutions, pictures in Life magazine of policemen grabbing Black Panthers like they were Viet Cong—somehow it all runs together in the head with the whole thing of how beautiful they are. Sharp as a blade. The Panther women—there are three or four of them on hand, wives of the Panther 21 defendants, and they are so lean, so lithe, as they say, with tight pants and Yoruba-style headdresses, almost like turbans, as if they’d stepped out of the pages of Vogue, although no doubt Vogue got it from them. All at once every woman in the room knows exactly what Amanda Burden meant when she said she was now anti-fashion because “the sophistication of the baby blacks made me rethink my attitudes.”
Now Wolfe could not explicate this history and its results so knowledgeably without some sympathy for the subjects of his investigation. His attitude is not simply one of contempt; there is too much understanding in it for that. But there is satire, especially in the piece's opening explanation of how Bernstein and friends clamored to hire white (largely Hispanic) rather than black servants in preparation for their encounter with the Black Panthers.
Wolfe largely spares the Black Panthers themselves his satirical scrutiny. I suspect he sees them as honest political players, pursuing their interests in the open sans the complex codes of the comme il faut among the jet set, codes that often operate precisely to conceal conflicts of interest. In the slighter second piece in this volume, "Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers," he is more unsparing, and here his conservative politics come to the fore as he presents an elaborate game between community organizers and poverty programs in San Francisco. The staid bureaucrats, he explains, require the organizers to intimidate and harass them to justify getting anything done, though what they bring to the communities they ostensibly serve is often make-work amounting to little. Wolfe allows that this characteristic exchange of administrative liberalism helps to bring self-reliance to otherwise desperate constituencies, but here his scorn is withering, especially in his depiction of a climactic parade through the gilded and marble City Hall of children, grotesquely eating junk food, headed by an organizer in a dashiki.
But if "Radical Chic" helped me to understand aspects of elite media in the Age of Trump, "Mau-Mauing" helped me to understand why the last president—himself a former community organizer—often implored his audiences to push his ostensibly moderate government toward more radical goals; according to Wolfe, this is a longstanding technique for change in urban politics. While "Radical Chic" exhibits a certain tact in writing about the Black Panthers that prevents the piece's satire from lapsing into racist invective, though, "Mau-Mauing"—with its eponymous mocking allusion to anti-colonial revolt—does no such thing: its author is the anthropologist as insult artist, and the field report is acidly cartoonish, even if written with contemptuous relish.
The progression in this book, then, is the one narrated by this book: a rightward shift, a growing impatience with the attempt to display sympathies whose honest extension would mean your own undoing. It is true that this can be a cold and unfeeling doctrine, a Nietzschean call to the right of might, but on the other hand at least it does not have that particular reek of hypocrisy. And anyway, Wolfe seems to suggest in his relatively respectful allowance of voice and distance to the Black Panthers, better an open conflict of interests than the cheat that is the power-play of pity. Wolfe's own justly celebrated writing style, its dandiacal energy unimpeded by guilt or condescension, is the literary correlate of such an aristocratic politics.
The effect of Wolfe's satire against the high-low alliance made by radical chic is to shield the middle classes, the "silent majority," from the scorn of the cultural elite and the anger of the insurgent oppressed; yet Wolfe is certainly not of this middle realm himself. His overture to them—like so many we see today—is possibly only another unworkable and hypocritical partnership across the line dividing the cultural haves from the have-nots. As Flaubert claimed he was Emma Bovary even as he anatomized her delusions, so Wolfe might have to acknowledge a kinship with Leonard Bernstein. But I doubt the maestro is the doppelgänger Wolfe would have chosen out of his own text. Perhaps as he gazed across Bernstein's parlor, over the heads of the cringing liberals, he saw—in a moment of nostalgie all his own—the Field Marshal of the Black Panther Party as his own self-image in photo negative: the stylish warrior.
July 31, 2023
These two stories were published in 1970. Maybe they could be called Novelas or maybe they are just slightly long short stories. They could also be called fiction or satire or social commentary. The stories take place in high Society and contain a good deal of social commentary. It is hard for me to know how much truth is contained there in. The first story takes place in New York City. The second in San Francisco. Both stories explore the interface between black and white societies. Or maybe between poor and affluent societies. I may have already mentioned the word satire, but let me mention it again just to be sure that you understand. There is humor. And yet there is seriousness as well. Many real names are mentioned, especially in the first story, where a Who’s Who of New York City high Society is listed. Both stories gather together, will barely take up three or four hours of your time. But I think that your time will be well spent.
July 31, 2019
It was the first book I read by Tom Wolfe and I liked his special criticism of the Haute Société in New York and how they embraced progressive causes while not only being entirely conservative but also lart of the problem against which the progressive causes have risen up... It is amazing that this social class continues to do as of today! The book is highly New York oriented, so you see this whole bunch of New Yorkwr celebrities that you need to look them up if you haven't actually lived among the New Yorker haute société in the late sixties. The book has an interesting format as it switches from novel to criticism then to novel again and then the novel parts are not exactly novel-like because they are real events being narrated. I really liked Wolfe's style of writing. It kinda schools you in how to write!
May 29, 2023
This is a collection of 2 short stories/critical essays, not a book. Unbelievably funny writing, Wolfe’s social commentary drips with poignant sarcasm that especially encapsulates the turbulent racial relations of the late 1960s. Excellent afternoon read
March 15, 2022
Two exceptionally well-written vignettes, although I wonder why anyone involved would have permitted Wolfe's presence.
February 9, 2023
note: read radical chic and will update after mau mau
not what i expected but hilarious nonetheless
not what i expected but hilarious nonetheless
March 1, 2024
so snarky you want to resist, but spot the lie.
July 30, 2020
4 stars for Radical Chic and 3.5 for Mau-Mauing.
July 7, 2020
Change the names, a little bit of the lingo and add in some references to social media and both of these essays would still fly today. Oh, and I'm sure the neighborhoods in San Francisco have changed in the past 50 years.
After reading this, I checked out a bit of how Wolfe was generally regarded, having an only vague idea of him, myself, and I think I prefer not having any such tonal context. Because without talking about who he presented himself as or how others saw him, this book seems less like a savage critique and more like an insightful reportage that doesn't actually savage his subjects so much as it places them on a more egalitarian plane than they'd like.
So the "radical chic" movement is painted as sincere but also self-motivated: A desire to understand and help, but an equal desire to be seen as understanding and helpful. If the latter overpowers the former in the face of a little criticism, well, that is left for the reader to evaluate.
We live in an era of radical chic, where instead of struggling to be seen on the society pages of a newspaper, social climbers take selfies at riots. But there is less grounding in reality than ever. The "radical chic" of the book ends with the people involved being shamed. (Although, did it really ever end?) Modern chic radicals have no shame, and lack even the fig leaf of modesty of the '60s glitterati.
I assume the mechanics of extorting funds reported on in "Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers" have changed somewhat. The government doles out billions of dollars, creating "organizers" whose purposes is to advocate for the government doling out more billions, and that system seems pretty entrenched.
The modern approach is to mau-mau the corporations who, weirdly enough, don't even have flak-catchers. (People whose job it is to handle angry mobs.) They all seem to have sympathetic PR departments who do nothing but dole out money to the groups threatening them.
The underlying psychology remains unchanged: The mau-mauers (e.g., the mobs intimidating people trying to get through to their homes or jobs) still get the thrill of instilling fear in The Man (anyone who disagrees with them) and the guys getting the checks written still get the thrill of being connected to The Power.
But after 60 years or more of mau-mauing—which does lasting damage to society—those elements that restore stability (compassion, empathy, actual thought, justice, grace) are increasingly taxed. The upshot being the violent revolution the mau-mauers think they want, and that will be a costly lesson for everyone.
After reading this, I checked out a bit of how Wolfe was generally regarded, having an only vague idea of him, myself, and I think I prefer not having any such tonal context. Because without talking about who he presented himself as or how others saw him, this book seems less like a savage critique and more like an insightful reportage that doesn't actually savage his subjects so much as it places them on a more egalitarian plane than they'd like.
So the "radical chic" movement is painted as sincere but also self-motivated: A desire to understand and help, but an equal desire to be seen as understanding and helpful. If the latter overpowers the former in the face of a little criticism, well, that is left for the reader to evaluate.
We live in an era of radical chic, where instead of struggling to be seen on the society pages of a newspaper, social climbers take selfies at riots. But there is less grounding in reality than ever. The "radical chic" of the book ends with the people involved being shamed. (Although, did it really ever end?) Modern chic radicals have no shame, and lack even the fig leaf of modesty of the '60s glitterati.
I assume the mechanics of extorting funds reported on in "Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers" have changed somewhat. The government doles out billions of dollars, creating "organizers" whose purposes is to advocate for the government doling out more billions, and that system seems pretty entrenched.
The modern approach is to mau-mau the corporations who, weirdly enough, don't even have flak-catchers. (People whose job it is to handle angry mobs.) They all seem to have sympathetic PR departments who do nothing but dole out money to the groups threatening them.
The underlying psychology remains unchanged: The mau-mauers (e.g., the mobs intimidating people trying to get through to their homes or jobs) still get the thrill of instilling fear in The Man (anyone who disagrees with them) and the guys getting the checks written still get the thrill of being connected to The Power.
But after 60 years or more of mau-mauing—which does lasting damage to society—those elements that restore stability (compassion, empathy, actual thought, justice, grace) are increasingly taxed. The upshot being the violent revolution the mau-mauers think they want, and that will be a costly lesson for everyone.
May 21, 2022
Spineless, laughing-gas arrogance from a irony-pilled New York social climber in love with his own body odor (sound familiar?). The real radical chic is Wolfe himself — and the win his book gave to the very US Right forces that are exterminating any and all nonmechanized artistic impulse in people today. A leech of the worst brand.
“When Wolfe’s acid-tinged NEW YORK piece came out, it was so effective at rendering such [white liberal guilt] support radioactively uncool that Nixon’s assistant, Raymond K Price Jr personally wrote a note of praise to Wolfe: ‘I’ve seldom enjoyed a magazine article as much…Truly a classic.’” — Ben Davis, ART IN THE AFTER-CULTURE
Don Cox, the Panther at the center of the Bernstein Party: “As this layer of American society began to give us support, the reaction from the authorities was immediate and fierce. They launched a national campaign of slander and intimidation against what they, following Wolfe, called ‘radical chic.’ Many of our supporters from that class were intimidated and retreated, and the rest of the evenings we had planned similar to the Bernstein affair were canceled. I had a secret meeting with Felicia Bernstein at the studio where she painted, and she told me of the misery she and Leonard had endured since the night of the gathering. They had been receiving constant hate mail and phone calls, including threats to their lives. She wanted to know if there was anything I could do to help. I could think of nothing, other than to reiterate my belief that all people should stand up and defend what they believe; otherwise, fascism has fertile ground in which to grow.”
Of course, the liberals didn’t do that. The Panthers collapsed. And Tom got his books made into two Hollywood movies and lived happy ever after.
“When Wolfe’s acid-tinged NEW YORK piece came out, it was so effective at rendering such [white liberal guilt] support radioactively uncool that Nixon’s assistant, Raymond K Price Jr personally wrote a note of praise to Wolfe: ‘I’ve seldom enjoyed a magazine article as much…Truly a classic.’” — Ben Davis, ART IN THE AFTER-CULTURE
Don Cox, the Panther at the center of the Bernstein Party: “As this layer of American society began to give us support, the reaction from the authorities was immediate and fierce. They launched a national campaign of slander and intimidation against what they, following Wolfe, called ‘radical chic.’ Many of our supporters from that class were intimidated and retreated, and the rest of the evenings we had planned similar to the Bernstein affair were canceled. I had a secret meeting with Felicia Bernstein at the studio where she painted, and she told me of the misery she and Leonard had endured since the night of the gathering. They had been receiving constant hate mail and phone calls, including threats to their lives. She wanted to know if there was anything I could do to help. I could think of nothing, other than to reiterate my belief that all people should stand up and defend what they believe; otherwise, fascism has fertile ground in which to grow.”
Of course, the liberals didn’t do that. The Panthers collapsed. And Tom got his books made into two Hollywood movies and lived happy ever after.
November 12, 2018
Disclosure: I was born the year before Radical Chic appeared. I am not a baby boomer who lived the period, so I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the journalism.
Radical Chic is a tour de force of gonzo journalism. The background: Leonard Bernstein, the famous conductor, hosted a fundraising party for the Black Panthers in his Park Avenue co-op. Tom Wolfe then executes a hilarious piece of ethnographic research to explain why New York high society would hobnob with Maoist black separatists, who would if they could dispossess high society of everything. Along the way, he explains the absolute necessity of servants (and the challenge posed of the social norm to not have colored servants) and a summer home, why the left wing politics of Jews never moderated as they became wealthy, how New York high society turns over approximately every 40 years with new leading families emerging, and the editorial position of the New York Times.
Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers transports us to San Francisco, the San Francisco of the Mr. Tibbs movies, beset by class and racial strife. Here again with participant-observer ethnography, Wolfe in hilarious fashion explains the genetic relationship between anti-poverty programs, community organizing, and racial violence. Along the way, he describes in cultural anthropological terms the key figure in a government bureaucracy, the flak catcher.
Radical Chic is a tour de force of gonzo journalism. The background: Leonard Bernstein, the famous conductor, hosted a fundraising party for the Black Panthers in his Park Avenue co-op. Tom Wolfe then executes a hilarious piece of ethnographic research to explain why New York high society would hobnob with Maoist black separatists, who would if they could dispossess high society of everything. Along the way, he explains the absolute necessity of servants (and the challenge posed of the social norm to not have colored servants) and a summer home, why the left wing politics of Jews never moderated as they became wealthy, how New York high society turns over approximately every 40 years with new leading families emerging, and the editorial position of the New York Times.
Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers transports us to San Francisco, the San Francisco of the Mr. Tibbs movies, beset by class and racial strife. Here again with participant-observer ethnography, Wolfe in hilarious fashion explains the genetic relationship between anti-poverty programs, community organizing, and racial violence. Along the way, he describes in cultural anthropological terms the key figure in a government bureaucracy, the flak catcher.
April 4, 2015
Wolfe chronicles the relationship between blacks and whites - specifically, empowered blacks and high-class or governmental "powerful" whites - during the period of the late 60s.
One essay chronicles the brief "radical chic" fad, in which New York intellectuals hosted meetings for groups like the Black Panthers and the Young Lords, all laced with Wolfe's typical acid wit and eye for absurdity.
The other essay covers the same period, roughly, in San Francisco, in which ghetto residents organised to "mau mau" the "flak catchers" - confront the white establishment to attain money from poverty programs in the San Francisco area. Less amusing, perhaps, but still an interesting look at a curious, now long forgotten period of history.
Both essays are highly recommended, and the book is compulsively readable.
One essay chronicles the brief "radical chic" fad, in which New York intellectuals hosted meetings for groups like the Black Panthers and the Young Lords, all laced with Wolfe's typical acid wit and eye for absurdity.
The other essay covers the same period, roughly, in San Francisco, in which ghetto residents organised to "mau mau" the "flak catchers" - confront the white establishment to attain money from poverty programs in the San Francisco area. Less amusing, perhaps, but still an interesting look at a curious, now long forgotten period of history.
Both essays are highly recommended, and the book is compulsively readable.
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