Since I intend to use this little corner as a spleen-vent, it seems only fitting to kick it off with something that has been amusing me a lot lately. As amusing, that is, as a ten-car pile up where random bodies and body parts are being carried off by carrion crows in bits and pieces.
Am I the only one stunned by Tom Wolfe's current posing as a "Red-state Man of the People (tm)"? He started this current line of drivel in a Guardian interview the day before the US election where he came up with the same tired drooping argument that Faux News peddles 36 hours a day, of Bush-haters being 'out of touch' liberals. I howled with laughter at the sight of the ultimate dandy, long since marginalised from his old haunts by gradual loss of his talent and perception, now recasting himself as Jim Bob and Billy Joe Bigot's best pal!
With a bad book to plug (pension funds need topping up, now that King Dubya's about to give the economy a sulphuric acid enema, even a poseur Republican like Wolfe can see *that*!), Wolfe puts out even worse nonsense in a Rolling Stone piece. The lines to die for are these: "Right after 9/11, when Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson said that the attacks were punishment for the decadence of the American people, I found myself getting defensive on their behalf: "Robertson went to the same college that I did, and Falwell is from Lynchburg, Virginia. What they said was ludicrous, but these are my people!" You couldn't defend anything they said, but because of championism, I didn't want to see my people abused."
So let me see if I understand this - after a lifetime of writing about people reaching out to the stars, reaching for power, reaching for some kind of higher understanding (admittedly fuelled by vast quantities of hallucinogens, which tend to manufacture their own reality), Wolfe has decided that the only thing he has learnt from this life is "My ignorant, dumbass neighbour, right or wrong"???? He wants to call it "championism", one of those its-a-word-because-I-say-it-is words, which just sounds better than "greedy, racist, bigoted, gay bashing, evangelical thief-ism".
Am I the only one stunned by Tom Wolfe's current posing as a "Red-state Man of the People (tm)"? He started this current line of drivel in a Guardian interview the day before the US election where he came up with the same tired drooping argument that Faux News peddles 36 hours a day, of Bush-haters being 'out of touch' liberals. I howled with laughter at the sight of the ultimate dandy, long since marginalised from his old haunts by gradual loss of his talent and perception, now recasting himself as Jim Bob and Billy Joe Bigot's best pal!
With a bad book to plug (pension funds need topping up, now that King Dubya's about to give the economy a sulphuric acid enema, even a poseur Republican like Wolfe can see *that*!), Wolfe puts out even worse nonsense in a Rolling Stone piece. The lines to die for are these: "Right after 9/11, when Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson said that the attacks were punishment for the decadence of the American people, I found myself getting defensive on their behalf: "Robertson went to the same college that I did, and Falwell is from Lynchburg, Virginia. What they said was ludicrous, but these are my people!" You couldn't defend anything they said, but because of championism, I didn't want to see my people abused."
So let me see if I understand this - after a lifetime of writing about people reaching out to the stars, reaching for power, reaching for some kind of higher understanding (admittedly fuelled by vast quantities of hallucinogens, which tend to manufacture their own reality), Wolfe has decided that the only thing he has learnt from this life is "My ignorant, dumbass neighbour, right or wrong"???? He wants to call it "championism", one of those its-a-word-because-I-say-it-is words, which just sounds better than "greedy, racist, bigoted, gay bashing, evangelical thief-ism".
I found myself wishing if only Wolfe had gone to high school with one of the Catholic priests who was caught up in the child-abuse scandal, to see if he could come up with a good way of justifying that. Since anything is permissible as long as the perpetrator is connectable to Wolfe's past, you can only wonder how Osama missed a trick by not driving a pickup truck around Lynchburg for a few months before 9/11 so that he would have at least one tireless defender in America.
With all this, I had to wonder - how come this "champion" of the real people doesn't live where the real people apparently do? He lives in Manhattan? Where latte-swilling lesbians and gays secretly plot ways to overthrow Jesus's kingdom, overthrow the holy and sacred institution of marriage, outlaw guns, promote vicious cults that will enforce abortion at the age of 5 and force everyone to convert to Islam, that Manhattan?
The age of fools is upon us, when court jesters and jerk-off artists see sages and savants when they look in the mirror.
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