Someone made the odd, maybe malicious, certainly rash decision to put Tom
Wolfe on the right-hand side of the cover of Harper's new 150th anniversary
issue, facing Mark Twain, a leonine, earthy, dignified old devil, sitting in
alert repose, apparently listening. A man to whose energetic image the white
suit is incidental. Over on the right-hand side, Wolfe's white suit is
dominant, looking just a shade too big for its shriveled occupant, who gazes
nowhere in particular with a smirk of wooden self-satisfaction.
The bizarre juxtaposition of Wolfe with Twain consummates 30 years'
inflation of the former's modest talents. To read his breathless prose,
shrill with yaps and self-importance, is like having a small dog attack
one's leg. Wolfe's anniversary essay is called, "In the Land of the Rococo
Marxists. Why No One is Celebrating the Second American Century." As Jan. 1,
2000, arrived, Wolfe asks, "Did a single, solitary savant note that the
First American Century had just come to an end and the Second American
Century had begun?" To which, of course, the answer is that Americans saw
the millennial chronology as mostly hype, hooked loosely to the Christian
calendar, and excitingly dressed up in the vestments of a modern Apocalypse
or Second Coming, the Y2K circus. They weren't bothering with anything so
pompous as the "Second American Century."
Wolfe's habitual technique is to say something, and then, repeat it at
accelerating degrees of shrill enthusiasm for his own insight. In this case,
Paragraph 1 announces popular indifference at the millennial turnover to
America's imperial triumphs. Paragraph 2 belabors the same thought again:
"Did a single historian mention that America now dominates the world ...?"
More of the same in Paragraphs 3, 4 and 5.
What Wolfe doesn't grasp is that his fellow Americans have better manners
than he. Does a man boast about making his second billion? Wolfe's premise
is balderdash. Americans know they have an empire. It's simply bad form to
exult along the lines proposed by Wolfe.
But Wolfe doesn't blame the ordinary folk for failing to cheer America's
second century. Wolfe, don't forget, pretends to speak for the ordinary folk
against the intellectuals. In his latest retread of a stunt he's been
pulling since he unveiled "radical chic" all those years ago, he now calls
these intellectuals "the Rococo Marxists." In Wolfe's inflamed imagination,
these RMs have somehow stealthily persuaded the American people that it's
wrong to be vainglorious about Empire. Marxism has this power in America?
He's got to be kidding.
Wolfe is flogging a horse so dead there's neither hide nor flesh left on
the bones. Didn't Harper's research department nudge Wolfe's elbow, direct
his attention to the tempest over political correctness at the start of the
nineties when the PC crowd, aka the Rococo Marxists, were sapping the
nation's virility with exhibitions like the Smithsonian's "West as America,"
where the heroic, 19th-century paintings were tricked out with beastly,
knowing captions compromising America's historical virtue? Didn't they hint
tactfully that it's a little late in the day to discover the pernicious
influence of fancy French intellectuals like Michel Foucault or Jacques
Derrida, or to make jokes about PC profs getting their students to spell
"women" as "womyn"?
Wolfe knows very little about anything interesting. What he mostly knows is
how to be knowing. The undergrowth of his prose rustles with absurdities.
Here's a passage, where Wolfe is grandly announcing that the operative
definition of the intellectual is someone who has quite seemly
specialization for larger fields: "The prime example was Noam Chomsky, a
brilliant linguist. ... But Chomsky was not known as an intellectual until
he denounced the war in Vietnam, something he knew next to nothing about --
thereby qualifying for his new eminence."
In other words, assessment of the merits of killing off a couple of million
Vietnamese was a specialized discipline, the purview of Samuel P.
Huntington, Walt Rostow, and other house intellectuals of Empire. Chomsky,
who made Vietnam the object of close study for more than a decade and a
half, was somehow disqualified because he wasn't a political scientist under
contract to RAND, or one of the war-strategizing university think tanks, or
the Pentagon.
Back one more time into the rustling thicket of Wolfe's nonsense: " ...
structuralism, post-structuralism, post-modernism, deconstruction,
reader-response theory, commodification theory. ... This will not be Vulgar
Marxism; it will be ... Rococo Marxism, elegant as a Fragonard, sly as a
Watteau ..." Elegant as a Fragonard! What can Wolfe be
talking about? Late Marxism and post-Marxism in all their myriad hues may
have some redeeming qualities, but the elegance of Fragonard is certainly
not among them. Wolfe doesn't know anything about Marxism. His ignorance is
so profound, he doesn't even know how to be knowing about it.
It's all so ... dated. Here he is, making labored fun
of Susan Sontag ("Her prose style ... had a handicapped parking sticker
valid at Partisan Review.") about 20 years too late. Poor Wolfe, someone
should tell him the news. Those good soldiers in Seattle or in Washington
raising their ruckus against Empire don't have Fish or Butler or even
Foucault in their backpacks. They're on different terrain altogether. Wolfe
always was a follower of fashion, and there's nothing so silly as a
fashion-plate appearing in the intellectual and prose equivalent of periwig
and ruffles, like some figure of the ancient regime,
when the rest of the world has moved on.
To find out more about Alexander Cockburn and read features by other
columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at
www.creators.com.
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