Word: chic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Equally attentive was the U.S. Treasury Department, which last week recommended that manufacturers equip the belts with dummy bullets, assured to be inoperable, instead of with whole cartridges (theoretically convertible into live ammunition without benefit of license). Otherwise, the latest accessory of the Decadent Chic might just manage to circumvent its wearers by landing them not on the Ten Best Dressed list, but on the Ten Most Wanted...
...Radical Chic and Mou-Mouing the Flak-Catchers, by Tom Wolfe. Two related pieces of social satire about the confrontation between Black Power and white guilt...
...large portions of it originally printed in a June issue of New York magazine) centers on that now famous money-raising party for the Black Panthers given in Conductor Leonard Bernstein's Manhattan apartment last January. For the occasion (TIME, Jan. 26), Wolfe coined the phrase "radical chic." He thus described the tendency among bright blooded, moneyed or otherwise distinguished New Yorkers−lately grown weary of plodding, via media middle-class institutions like the Heart Ball, the U.J.A. and the N.A.A.C.P.−to take up extreme, exotic, earthy and more titillating causes. To hear Wolfe tell it, radical...
...embarrassing approval of the Neanderthals ("You see! you see!") but the threat of stoning at the hands of enraged reformers and black extremists alike. When a TIME reporter recently asked a minister of the Panther Party's shadow government about the truthfulness of Wolfe's Radical Chic account, the reply was ominous: "You mean that dirty, blatant, lying, racist dog who wrote that fascist disgusting thing in New York magazine...
Wolfe's peculiar blend of artistic omniscience and journalistic detail has often troubled readers who cannot decide where reality leaves off and Wolfe begins. These two pieces are not entirely proof against such doubts. Radical Chic frequently goes too far in Wolfe's "Everybody there felt ..." generalizations. Still, it is generally so accurate that even some of the irate guests at the Bernsteins later wondered how Wolfe−who in fact used shorthand−managed to smuggle a tape recorder onto the premises. Satire is no way to win friends. If the Panthers ever do take over...