[dennisw]

[lesser_satan]

bump for later (when I have an hour or two to read all that)

[GOP Poet]

Ping for later!

[Dark Skies]

bump for later.

[BruceysMom]

What a great read! Thank you so much!
PJ

[bubman]

I am speechless!!

[Dumb_Ox]

A pleasure to read. I wasn't aware Wolfe thought that neuroscience is beginning to oppose neo-Darwinism. Is that a new development? I thought he was a big booster of evolutionary psychology in humans under the neo-Darwinian paradigm.

His depiction of language as a qualitative leap is foreshadowed in the semiotic works of Walker Percy, also a novelist but a doctor as well.

[Getready]

Tom Wolfe is a great writer, with great insight into our
society. His ability to coin phrases and/or mangle our
current vernacular with incredible accurary is legendary.

His basic thesis that cultured humans strive for their
exaltation in their own "statussphere" is correct up to a
point. The striving will stop when people realize that the
statusphere is an illusion.This occurs when the "life"
these folks live is changed by positive entropic
effects (i.e. disease, physical degradation, and death).
Then the question of the meaning of existence and the future
of ones existing come into play. Saying that Jesus only
brought hope in this world was truly downplaying the
documents written about Christ. The documents about Christ
talk about his unearthly ways, and his domination of
death by his resurrection. The statussphere(if you will) to be obtained
is "living with the author of life" and not final
irreversible degradation.

[operation clinton cleanup]

Thanks for posting. Interesting (long) read!

[nopardons]

bttt

[Tribune7]

"You and Me, Baby" by the Bloodhound Gang, proclaims, "You and me, baby, we ain't nothing but mammals. / So let's do it like they do on the Dis-cov-ery Channel"

IIRC, the video's theme was apes going to Paris to capture French people for exhibit.

[Dark Skies]

Thx for posting this dennis...

It was a long read and during the reading of it, I found myself (or at least my opinion of this article) evolving.

In the beginning I thought, "that Tom Wolfe sure can write...I wonder where he's going with this."

Sometime around the middle, I thought, "Tom sure has transformed a very complicated world into a much simpler one."

But by the end, I thought this article could be entitled, "Bart Simpson's History of the World."

If Tom wants to evolve, I suggest he leave his multi-million dollar co-op on Park Ave by way of the internet...and start FReeping. His article would be much meatier if he had subjected himself to the intellectual colosseum at Free Republic.com. It is obvious that he is gifted but just as obvious that he is not bringing his ideas down to street level...down to Freep Street.

[Revolting cat!]

Great essay!

[Tom D.]

Wow. Wolfe is similar to Steyn, except that he goes into more detail and he goes deeper.

[DaveTesla]

Capturing control over language, especially the language
of morality, opens the doors to psychological control of
the masses.

"Most people will reject ideas and
institutions if they become convinced of their basic
immorality; most people, too, lack the kind of training
that will equip them to untangle the thicket of logical
fallacies that might be involved," writes Yates.

Having assumed control of the language of morality,
especially in institutions such as the media and academia,
the way is now clear for the Gramscian transformation of
society.

Yates points out that political correctness is the primary
weapon in the war against those values. Academic schools
of radical feminism, "critical race theory," gay and
lesbian "queer theory," the preoccupation with "diversity"
as an end in itself and all other forms of PC are direct
descendent's of Gramsci - they are the chief arm of
enforcement of the Gramscian transformation of American
society.

For all the attacks on the culture and beliefs of the GOD
of Abraham the end result is that the power hungry wish
to replace the church and GOD with themselves.
Of these things GOD gives us free will.....

The Marxist dictators / gods (Little g) will NOT.

[nothingnew]

Tom Wolfe didn't like paragraphs much, did he?

FMCDH(BITS)

[BunnySlippers]

[SirJohnBarleycorn]

I had arrived believing that, for example, Mexicans who had gone to the trouble of coming to the United States legally, going through all the prescribed steps, would resent the fact that millions of Mexicans were now coming into the United States illegally across the desert border. I couldn't have been more mistaken. I discovered that everyone who thought of himself as Latin, even people who had been in this country for two and three generations, were wholeheartedly in favor of immediate amnesty and immediate citizenship for all Mexicans who happened now to be in the United States. And this feeling had nothing to do with immigration policy itself, nothing to do with law, nothing to do with politics, for that matter. To them, this was not a debate about immigration. The very existence of the debate itself was to them a besmirching of their fiction-absolute, of their conception of themselves as Latins. Somehow the debate, simply as a debate, cast an aspersion upon all Latins, implying doubt about their fitness to be within the border of such a superior nation.

Bush/Rove are nuts if they think amnesty will create a republican majority among hispanics.

Hispanics will prove quite receptive to the poisonous racist demagoguery that is the special gift of the democRat party. Republicans will never get more than 35-40% of that vote at best.

[SirJohnBarleycorn]

Book One, first verse, of the Book of John in the New Testament says cryptically: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." This has baffled Biblical scholars, but I interpret it as follows: Until there was speech, the human beast could have no religion, and consequently no God. In the beginning was the Word. Speech gave the beast its first ability to ask questions, and undoubtedly one of the first expressed his sudden but insatiable anxiety as to how he got here and what this agonizing struggle called life is all about. To this day, the beast needs, can't live without, some explanation as the basis of whatever status he may think he possesses. For that reason, extraordinary individuals have been able to change history with their words alone, without the assistance of followers, money, or politicians.

Wolfe does not credit him in this particular lecture but the Weber who so influenced young Wolfe was, of course, only building upon the insights offered by Nietzsche. Culture is a construct created by the myth-making "charismatic" individual, a Moses, a Jesus, a Mohammed, or so we were taught by Nietzsche (and to Moses et al we can add "Marx" and "Darwin" and "fill in the blank"). Ordinary people operate within, and seek the status defined by, the cultures created by the exceptional culture-creating people. Now the latest wrinkle is that culture-creation is only made possible by speech, and that the rules of culture creation take us above and beyond the simplistic animalistic natural selection theories offered by the Darwinists -- So what?

The "longing for status" that fascinated Weber and later Wolfe is in essence the same "longing for gods" that Nietsche described. As the Word reveals, man without God is idolatrous, and selfish pride (HipHoppers, Good Ole Boys, Fighter Pilots, Society or any other "status group") is no less a form of idolatry than worshipping a golden calf or a false prophet or History with a capital "H" (Marx). And Wolfe undoubtedly must realize that Epictetus and the Stoics are no exception to the rule (reference is to "A Man in Full").

And what if John really did have a revelation from God? And what if Calvin really did have a correct understanding of that revelation? Where does that leave Nietzsche, Weber and Wolfe?