Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers

The cringing white liberal and the self-serving bureaucrat, the sychophantic Jewish silver-spoon socialist and the cunning black race-baiting political opportunist -- these are the types of characters that Tom Wolfe elucidates with wicked satire in his stories, which are a titillating admixture of acid fiction and scathing journalism. The types in this book, moreover, seem to be a fixture of the contemorary world, and their elucidation by Wolfe amounts to a humorous education in past forms. One cannot help but note that militant Islam receives the same perverted reception from several quarters as did the likes of the Black Panther movement of yore.

I can't believe it took me this long to get around to reading this book. Here we see the rich and famous cavorting with violent anti-white, anti-American, and anti-Semitic criminals during the 1960s. It's hard to say who these pampered masochistic high society types hated more; themselves or their own people. Wolfe's recounting of Leonard Bernstein's "ode to the Panthers" party is outstanding. It's great journatlism. Heck, you know a situation is surreal when Barbara Walters is a voice of reason at a social gathering. As a writer, Wolfe, could not possibly have done a better job. The narrator is everywhere but is not himself a character in the proceedings. He may be a fly on the wall but he is a fly that takes copious notes. The details are magnificent and he has a savant's eye for great quotations. You'll laugh, you'll rage, the limousine liberals and champagne socialists will astound you. The book was written over 30 years ago but it is just as applicable today as one could replace The Black Panthers with a nineties fellon like Mumia Abu Jamal. The section on mau-mauing, or the fine art of the racial shakedown, is totally priceless. It too is as applicable to the present as to the past. Wolfe foreshadows the great future successes of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson at coercing cash out of whites who willingly give it away to ease their politically correct minds. A magnificent effort and, at 10 bucks, the price isn't bad--a pity that he didn't write another 200 pages.

Tom Wolfe's singular brand of commentary reached it sharp, devastating pinnacle in this biting portrait of that pitiable creature - the wealthy white liberal. With verve, a strong metaphorical flourish, and a ready ability to move the story forward, Wolfe finely details a party that was intended to embody the ethos of an era, and unwittingly did.This party on January 14, 1970 (Woodstock and the flag on the moon are dissipating euphorium; Altamont is a fresh bruise) brings crafty, radical, violent Black Panthers into the lair of America's great conductor Leonard Bernstein for a fund-raiser.It's all here: the saccharine philosophizing, the goofy earnestness, the willful suspension of reasoning, even the seeds of the increasingly acrimonious relationship between America's blacks and Jews.Wolfe adroitly draws the scene for us:"[Black Panther speaker] Cox seizes the moment: `Our Minister of Defense, Huey P. Newton, has said if we can't find a meaningful life.. you know... maybe we can have a meaningful death... and one reason the power structure fears the Black Panthers is that they know the Black Panthers are ready to die for what they believe in, and a lot of us have already died.'Lenny seems like a changed man. He looks up at Cox and says, `When you walk into this house, into this building' - and he gestures vaguely as if to take it all in, the moldings, the sconces, the Roquefort morsels rolled in crushed nuts, the servants, the elevator attendant and the doormen downstairs in their white dickeys, the marble lobby, the brass struts on the marquee out front - "when you walk into this house, you must feel infuriated!'Cox looks embarrasses. `No, man... I manage to overcome that... That's a personal thing...'...`Well,' says Lenny, `it makes me mad!'The self-loathing, the fashionable decrial of one's own self, yet the never quite-so-brave as to deny it. As this is a short, short work, I can't reveal too much more without giving away the entire plotline, which is awfully enjoyable for you to watch unfold. I will say that this is Tom Wolfe writing at its boldest, full-throated best. Wolfe has a way of fetishizing a particular object and using it to illuminate the differences among his subjects. He does this to great effect here with the "Roquefort morsels rolled in crushed crumbs" mentioned above, and it is a delight to watch this talented polemicist run this device through its paces.All the blurbs on the back of this book deem this a "sociological" work, which must have been a Word-in-Vogue at the time of its publishing. This is a hell of a lot more interesting than any sociology, and more important in its way too.Now, let's be clear on what you're getting here - this is basically a long magazine article that even with small book format, generous margins and gutter-sized line spacing only runs to four score and two pages. Hence the need to include the entirely adequate "Mau-mauing the Flak-catchers" to bulk it up to a more decorous triple-digit page cou

Take a half-cup of William F. Buckley, mix with a spoonful of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, stir in a dollop of David Horowitz, and leaven with a pinch of Hunter S. Thompson; boil, simmer, and stir----and you have Tom Wolfe, acerbic and acid observer of 20th century American society and possibly one of the keenest society writers since Ambrose Bierce. Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers is a slender little tome, with just 152 pages comprising two essays that cut to the quick of race and class relations in American society during the "Summer of Love." These two witty and mesmerizing little essays cut to the heart of the bizarre practice of society's elite espousing radical causes, and effectively capture and explain the seeming paradox of that strangest of modern beasts, the Limousine Liberal. The first essay, "Radical Chic", is Wolfe's account of the high-society party thrown by New York Symphony conductor Leonard Bernstein and his wife for members of the Black Panthers, at the time a rising group of racialist incendiaries, revolutionaries, and terrorists. But as Wolfe points out, to the jaded, bored, decadent Central Park elite, they were exciting! Glamorous! Naughty! And highly fashionable, which is why the Thing to Do in New York High Society in 1969 was to throw penthouse parties for radicals. What caused this? And why is it that so many of the affluent and wildly rich of today's American high society sport such radically leftist views, championing causes from banning fur to banning handguns to abolishing capitalism? According to Wolfe, it's a tactic of the newly rich called "nostalgie de la boue." Translated as "nostalgia for the mud", it takes the form of romanticizing the trappings, fashion, style, and even radical philosophies of the underclass in pursuit of irony, social aplomb, and prestige. While Wolfe doesn't mention this, even Marie Antoinette engaged in her own "nostalgie de la boue", meticulously recreating a 17th century French peasant village on the grounds of Versailles, where she and her ladies-in-waiting would play at being French peasant women. "Radical Chic" takes the reader on a fascinating trip inside Bernstein's Park Avenue luxury apartment, but the reporter-style writing is actually drier than the more engaging "Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers." And best of all, "Radical Chic" offers a hysterical running dialogue between Lenny Bernstein and Black Panther Don Cox that Hollywood itself couldn't improve upon---with guest appearances by Barbara Walters, the Belafontes, and Otto Preminger! "Mau Mau-ing the Flak Catchers" is more flamboyant, and, oddly enough, more interesting. "Mau-mauing" operates as a sort-of handbook for inner-city psychological against the "Man" (read: white middle-class social services bureaucrats) for fun, prizes, and most of all, money. Interestingly enough, Mau-Mauing (getting some friends and going down to the local social services office for a demonstration) played off white dread of the R

These are two long essays dealing with Race in America in the late 1960's. Radical Chic is the more famous of the two. Imagine the scene as Leonard Bernstien and his wife throw a cocktail party in their posh Manhattan Apartment with members of the Black Panther Party as the guests of honor. Wolfe was present at this strange event and offers a play by play of how Radical became all the Chic in the New York social scene...briefly. Bernstien's reputation received national tarnish, and Wolfe explains it all in his witty and insightful style. The book takes a snapshot of the late 60's and Wolfe deconstructs it to explain:White Guilt, New York Society, Zeitgeist, Media Frenzy and other assorted Social-Pop phenomena. Radical Chic is a fun read and will explain a lot about how the better half understood the radicalism of the 60's. I actually prefer the lesser known Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. Anyone who has ever been involved in interest group politics will howl with laughter as angry minority youths confront pasty white bureaucrats in Oakland in the late 60's. This essay doesn't have the celebrity glamour of Radical Chic, but a lot more people have worked on local race and diversity issues than have made the Manhattan scene with Lenny Bernstien and the like. This essay really explains the purest democratization that was the result of the radical politics of the 60's.