Tuesday, May 8, 2007
Tom Wolfe
This article titled “Dandy with a taste for literary spats” is written by Trevor Butterworth — a dandy name right out of WC Fields. The article examines the long-lived, lively career of Tom Wolfe.
Wolfe addresses the default slam on Bush — that he is an idiot:
“It was … said that we had a very stupid president. You should have been here when Eisenhower was president; he was not very good in a press conference because he would start a sentence with a relative clause and by the time he started adding more relative clauses and appositions, he never got to the subject or the predicate. So he was called really stupid. How can this guy run the country? But, you see, all he did was win World War II! There must have been something there!
“Very few people remember the way Reagan was portrayed as an idiot,” he adds, citing a comment by Henry Kissinger that, after 20 minutes in Reagan’s company, one found oneself asking: “How on Earth can the fate of the free world be in the hands of this man?” And yet for all that, says Wolfe, Reagan kept making the right decisions.
“Bush is portrayed as a moron. I’ve only conversed with him a couple of times – not for very long – but I found he was more literate on literature than the editor of the New York Review of Books, Bob Silvers. I’ve talked to both of them, and he makes Bob Silvers look like a slug.”
Apparently the battle between Wolfe and the NYRB has been going on for a long time. “In the 1960s Wolfe mocked the Review as the 'chief theoretical organ of Radical Chic', after it published a cover picture showing how to make a Molotov cocktail.”
At one time the NYRB was the premier intellectual journal of the Western World. Wonderful articles, each issue offering an insight into the most arcane of academic specialties, written beautifully by experts in the field. The NYRB has deteriorated markedly; it is the self-same ideological toxicity Wolfe identifies that has done it; many fine minds poisoned by simple-minded advocacy. An all too familiar syndrome these days.