Word: chic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...such thoughts present themselves with added force after the publication of Tom Wolfe's Radical Chic, it's only because our reception of Wolfe's book has itself contributed another turn to the screw. Not only do we allow ourselves to feel superior to Leonard Bernstein and his friends, but we also feel a certain superiority over Wolfe himself for exposing them through the methods he chose. After all now, Gloria Steinem didn't like...
...RADICAL CHIC as one is high-handed enough to assume everyone by now knows, grew out of a party-meeting- for the occasion's definition later grew to be the center of the dispute- given last January by Felicia and Leonard Bernstein in order to raise money for the Black Panthers' defense fund. Held in the Bernstein's 13-room, Park Avenue penthouse, the party-meeting featured a number of famous guests- Wolfe mentions most of them- and a collection of lesser known that Felicia had become acquainted with during her years of interest in various civil rights causes- they...
...Wolfe, the atmosphere was redolent of Radical Chic, the social posturing he himself was about to immortalize. Radical Chic, he writes, "invariably favors radicals who seem primitive, exotic, and romantic, such as the grape workers, who are not merely radical and 'of the soil' but also Latin; the Panthers, with their leather pieces, Afros, shades, and shoot-outs; and the Red Indians, who, of course, had always seemed primitive, exotic, and romantic." And yet while supporting her cause, the Radically Chic hostess has also to maintain the proper apartment, the proper address, and, of course, the proper servants. At best...
...more an Eastern mystic than a flaming Latino. The Panthers appear to many Establishment Jews as sufficiently threatening to make any infatuation with them rather unthinkable. And it's to our dishonor that the American Indian will have to be rehabilitated before he can appear romantic again. And other chic causes? Like the Southampton party for women's lib. Certainly, whatever she may be, exotic Betty Friedan...
...society. He even cites social thinkers- Vernon L. Parrington, Wolfe identifies as "the literary historian," while managing to cite the triad of Seymour Martin Lipset, Nathan Glazer, and Kenneth Keniston in one of the sentences that follows- but more in the way of demonstrating his own brand of Academic Chic. (Wolfe took a doctorate in American Studies from Yale, and, like many a modern-day journalist, still yearns to justify his existence to the boys in the ivory tower he left behind.) But "history" is not enough, not when Wolfe refuses to consider the larger problems of American life. Perhaps...