How Did He Get Away With It?

City-Journal ^ | 14 Sep 2023 | John Tierney

[Rummyfan]

Long before the rest of us were talking about blue and red America, Tom Wolfe not only recognized the cultural divide; he bridged it. When he began his career in the 1960s, the liberal establishment was more dominant and even smugger than it is today. There were no pesky voices on cable television or the web to challenge the Eastern elites’ hold on the national media. Then along came Wolfe, a lone voice celebrating the hinterland’s culture, mercilessly skewering the pretensions and dogmas of New York’s intelligentsia—and somehow triumphing.

How did he get away with it? The most entertaining analysis opens in theaters this weekend in New York and next weekend in Los Angeles and Toronto. The documentary, Radical Wolfe, is a superb chronicle of his life and career, told through footage of Wolfe (who died in 2018 at the age of 88) expounding in his famous white suits. It features the Jon Hamm reading from Wolfe’s work along with interviews with his friends and enemies, his daughter, Alexandra Wolfe, and his fans, including Christopher Buckley, Niall Ferguson, Gay Talese, and Peter Thiel. Director Richard Dewey draws on the insights and research of Michael Lewis, who pored through the archive of Wolfe’s letters and papers for a 2015 article in Vanity Fair, “How Tom Wolfe Became . . . Tom Wolfe.”

[Pelham]

I’d forgotten how much air-headed nonsense was spouted about hippies back then.

Yablonsky the sociologist and Sanders the Fug served up a feast of liberal faux-intellectual drivel, while a totally drunk Jack Kerouac mocked the whole show. His black humor theory on jeeps and the Vietnam war got a laugh out of me.

[Pelham]

Here’s Ginsburg commenting on that show and especially his pal Kerouac:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zAW02FmLiY