It’s couched in oh, so delicate terms, as pretty much everyone mourns the death of the great Tom Wolfe.  Tom Wolfe was a reporter; Tom Wolfe was an observer.  Tom Wolfe eyed status-seeking.  Tom Wolfe skewered the establishment.  And through his incredible mastery of words, he entertained the hell out of us.

Yes, true enough.  But somehow he never got a Nobel Prize in literature, despite vastly outranking almost everyone else who has.

So I guess I am corrupting things a little when I state the obvious about Wolfe: he did write; he did observe; he did skewer; and by gosh, it all added up to making the left look stupid, particularly the cultural left, because it is the establishment.  There is no way a writer this honest could not find them.  And because he was a ferocious believer in and chronicler of American exceptionalism, he got them good.

Oh, he made the left look stupid.  It’s why reading his work is such a delicious pleasure.

I read through the long, awesome piece in Vanity Fair by Michael Lewis, called “How Tom Wolfe Became Tom Wolfe,” to make sure I didn’t miss any clues, and though it took me an hour to read, it was extremely useful. Killing the Deep State... Jerome R. Corsi Ph.D. Best Price: $3.14 Buy New $7.17 (as of 05:50 UTC - Details)

Turns out Wolfe got his start in red country, the genteel world of Richmond, Virginia, and was close to his conservative father.  He never abandoned that world, which meant he stayed an outsider, a “deplorable” all his life.  He was amused by President Trump and seemed to like the man – read this short passage of his thoughts in this American Spectator here, an incisive, original analysis from Wolfe about Trump.

There’s a heck of a lot more from deep in his background.  Lewis wrote that Wolfe was right on to the left from his late college days, at least – his Ph.D. at Yale was all about the communist influence in American literature, a topic that almost didn’t pass muster from the leftists at Yale then and certainly wouldn’t even be entertained at such an establishment now (except in oozingly flattering terms, perhaps).

Wolfe understood the importance of rural America in the creation of heroes and the stultifying groupthink of too much exposure to cities, a “deplorable” idea indeed that we are living now.  Such were the good takeaways from Lewis.

As a result, Wolfe’s glory was in destroying the left with his words.

How on Earth can anyone look at Lenny Bernstein sucking up to the 1960s Black Panthers the same way after a passage like this?

MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.  THESE ARE NICE.  LITTLE Roquefort cheese morsels rolled in crushed nuts.  Very tasty.  Very subtle.  It’s the way the dry sackiness of the nuts tiptoes up against the dour savor of the cheese that is so nice, so subtle.  Wonder what the Black Panthers eat out here on the hors d’oeuvre trail?  Do the Panthers like little Roquefort cheese morsels rolled in crushed nuts this way, and asparagus tips in mayonnaise dabs, and meatballs petites au Coq Hardi, all of which are at this very moment being offered to them on gadrooned silver platters by maids in black uniforms with hand-ironed white aprons? Secret Empires: How th... Peter Schweizer Best Price: $9.41 Buy New $14.90 (as of 10:05 UTC - Details)

When I first read that as a college student, I couldn’t stop laughing.  I memorized that passage because it was so funny.

Wolfe did fantastic work targeting the academic left in general.  One of his finest passages was on how leftists always yelled about fascism in America, yet it was Europe that had the problem:

The dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.

He wrote about what a bunch of perverts these fashionable lefties were, too, lusting after the college girls as they gave their pompous progressive lectures, with one such lecturer thinking:

“The little blonde bud from the creative-writing class is a sure thing, but she’ll insist on a lot of literary talk first[.] … The big redhead on the lecture committee will spare me that, but she talks to me as if I’m seventy years old[.] … Little Bud? … or Big Red?

He went after the mainstream media, too, acting as paparazzi on the astronauts ofThe Right Stuff, seeking to interview “the dog, the cat, the rhododendrons,” which told you all you needed to know – and was hysterically funny, too.

Read the Whole Article

$post_author: WP_User Object
(
    [data] => stdClass Object
        (
            [ID] => 5860
            [user_login] => no_author
            [user_pass] => 6581364babeda3eebbeb65d5094e43d1
            [user_nicename] => no_author
            [user_email] => [email protected]
            [user_url] => 
            [user_registered] => 2013-07-08 16:44:09
            [user_activation_key] => 
            [user_status] => 0
            [display_name] => No Author
            [type] => wpuser
        )

    [ID] => 5860
    [caps] => Array
        (
            [author] => 1
        )

    [cap_key] => wp_capabilities
    [roles] => Array
        (
            [0] => author
        )

    [allcaps] => Array
        (
            [upload_files] => 1
            [edit_posts] => 1
            [edit_published_posts] => 1
            [publish_posts] => 1
            [read] => 1
            [level_2] => 1
            [level_1] => 1
            [level_0] => 1
            [delete_posts] => 1
            [delete_published_posts] => 1
            [email_single_user] => 1
            [email_multiple_users] => 1
            [tablepress_edit_tables] => 1
            [tablepress_delete_tables] => 1
            [tablepress_list_tables] => 1
            [tablepress_add_tables] => 1
            [tablepress_copy_tables] => 1
            [tablepress_import_tables] => 1
            [tablepress_export_tables] => 1
            [tablepress_access_options_screen] => 1
            [tablepress_access_about_screen] => 1
            [author] => 1
        )

    [filter] => 
    [site_id:WP_User:private] => 1
)

get_the_author_meta: 

$bio: 

$bios: Array
(
)