Guardian Unlimited | US elections 2004 | ‘The liberal elite hasn’t got a clue’ Tom Wolfe speaks out in England.
I would vote for Bush if for no other reason than to be at the airport waving off all the people who say they are going to London if he wins again. Someone has got to stay behind.”
Where does it come from, this endorsement of the most conservative administration within living memory? Of this president who champions the right and the rich, who has taken America into the mire of war, and seeks re-election tomorrow? Wolfe’s eyes resume the expression of detached Southern elegance.
“I think support for Bush is about not wanting to be led by East-coast pretensions. It is about not wanting to be led by people who are forever trying to force their twisted sense of morality onto us, which is a non-morality.
He also anticipates that “conservatives will not like this new novel because I refuse to take the impact of political correctness seriously – I think PC has probably had a good effect because it is now bad manners to use racial epithets.”
So what is it about his liberal neighbours and fellow diners in his adoptive New York that Wolfe cannot abide? “I cannot stand the lock-step among everyone in my particular world. They all do the same thing, without variation. It gets so boring. There is something in me that particularly wants it registered that I am not one of them.”
This looks like a book pitch to me, but an interesting one. As for Wolfe NOT being “one of them.” I’ve seen this guy a couple of times in Manhattan and he actually dresses in these somewhat silly Mark Twain outfits and walks around town. He’s not likely to be registered as part of any group whatsoever.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110005842
“Worst October surprise. On the eve of the Spanish election, al Qaeda blew up a train in Madrid; before Australians voted, their embassy in Jakarta was hit. And all we got was a lousy videotape?”
Hah. Everything with Wolfe is a book pitch. 🙂 But he’s had a long history of tweaking conventions on both sides, but mainly of making the self-important cultural-elite dilettanti squirm. And that’s been his style since Kool Aid days, interestingly, back then he was thought of as quaint, smart and literate (by no less than Tina Brown herself, he was total “one of them”), and the fashion was an outgrowth of such, once he went slightly off-path per the accepted New York swarmy cocktail-party political conventions, and dared publicly say such, he became a kook that walks around in “Mark Twain outfits” and mutters things to himself, party of one; really started in force with ‘Vanities’, and later became a “bonfire” after ‘A Man in Full.’
And that Red-Blue map, bears everything he said out…East Coast pretensions spread to the dot.com hazy West Coast, well there is also the Upper Great Lakes Unionville and the “dead people vote” Chicago machine. The grand Red Sea, which is viewed as flyover country by both coasts, obvious a grand isolated groupthink disconnect. Haven’t a clue is dead-on.
Apparently all we needed was a videotape to frighten us. Low budget asymetrical war.
My biggest chuckle from the Bush acolytes — is their crowing over acquisition of the bigot vote — going all the way back to Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”.
I wonder how many neo-con ideologists really spend their weekends, starting out with eating innards basted with hog-fat at a NASCAR race and carry it all the way through with speaking in tongues at a good old fashioned revival temple Armageddon rally? Are you out there beating the drum to get creationism taught to your kids instead of science? Are you on your knees, every morning, praying to your G_d to speed up conversion of Jews to Christianity so the final stages of the journay to Heaven can begin?
I get to see some of those folks at family reunions — and I know why I don’t stay in touch with that part of my family. They’re your voters, not mine, bro’.