Quips and Quotations (Join the Side That You're Already On Edition)

 

1932-2023

I was, I guess, what would be called a left liberal, although I never thought of myself as all that left...I believed in civil rights and civil liberties, I favored racial integration, I thought responsibility for the international tensions of the cold war was equally distributed between the United States and the U.S.S.R.

--Victor Navasky, journalist, publisher emeritus of The Nation

Navasky with his protege and successor Katrina vanden Heuvel

 

Vital Viewing (People Will Talk Edition)

 

Filmmaker Robert Altman was born on this day in 1925. He died in 2006, but not before first receiving an Honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement. Lily Tomlin and Meryl Streep offer a rather lengthy introduction (which I'll explain in a bit), and then the great director himself: 

Robert Altman's revelation that he once had a heart transplant took just about anyone who recognized the name Robert Altman completely by surprise. Finding out you need a heart transplant, preparing beforehand for a heart transplant, recuperating from a heart transplant--doesn't all that take a while? No one could remember Altman being absent for any length of time. Now, he was a movie director and not a movie star, and so unlike the latter, Altman wasn't followed around by paparazzi the moment he walked off his property. Yet neither was he totally ignored by the portion of the media that covers the entertainment industry. For one thing he was a very prolific director, averaging a film a year since 1968. Some years there were two films. And there were projects for television (in the 1950s and '60s he been a prolific TV director) such as a new version of The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (with Brad Davis in the Humphrey Bogart role) and his election year collaboration with Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau, Tanner 88, starring a favorite actor of his, Michael Murphy. Altman also had an air of motion picture historicity about him, ever since his 1970 landmark film MASH introduced, or at least emphasized as no film had before, a whole grab bag of cinematic tricks that made the "New Hollywood" landmark of a few years earlier, The Graduate, look like The Great Train Robbery. By the 1990s, moviegoers had moved on to other things, and the box office misses exceeded the box office hits. Yet no matter how commercially (though not necessarily artistically) irrelevant he became, there always was enough of a buzz about a new Robert Altman film to guarantee him a fresh round of interviews with the leading entertainment journalists. So how in the world could a heart transplant be so overlooked?

Turns out one prominent entertainment journalist WAS paying attention. On December 3, 1995, Army Archerd in his long-running Variety column reported “Good wishes are out to director Robert Altman who underwent heart transplant surgery Sunday. Altman had known the surgery was necessary since last March, friends say.” Altman's wife Kathryn promptly got in touch with USA Today, and that venerable newsmagazine a few days later supposedly set the record straight: “If you heard Robert Altman had a heart transplant, we happily report it’s untrue. He has heart problems, he’s fine. He’ll be fishing next week.” We now know that Mrs. Altman was less than honest with the venerable newsmagazine, as she admitted later on, "We denied it like hell." Why? According to Altman himself "There was such a stigma associated with a heart transplant at that time" He was afraid no one would ever let him direct another film, thinking he might drop dead on the set. Well, it's understandable. Who among us hasn't fudged the truth on a job application or résumé? There's still the question of the prolific filmmaker's busy schedule. I looked up Altman's filmography, and there is in fact quite a gap between Prêt-à-Porter, which came out in December of 1994, and Kansas City, which was released in August of 1996. Had Altman been a movie star such a long absence from the public eye wouldn't have gone unnoticed, but he was a movie director, so it did. Altman lived another 11 years after his transplant, about four years short of average. However, it was not heart disease but another insidious malady that felled him: leukemia.

 We now move from the heart to another internal organ, the larynx, informally referred to as the voice box. If you're not familiar with Robert Altman's work, you may have been puzzled by Lily Tomlin's and Meryl Streep's introduction. Why were they stepping on each other's sentences? Was there static on the teleprompter? Lily and Meryl were in fact trying to evoke one of the defining features of an Altman film: overlapping dialogue. Now, Altman didn't come up with the idea. Howard Hawks used it in His Girl Friday (1940), and Orson Welles (along with every other cinematic trick) in Citizen Kane (1941). Altman, working thirty years after Hawks and Welles, had a technological advantage they lacked: multitrack recording, basically wiring each actor with a mike, taping each actor's dialogue with separate tape recorders, and later playing it all back in a sound studio, turning up the volume on the bit of dialogue most meaningful to the film. At least, I think that's how he did it. After all, I'm not a sound engineer (comment section mainstay Shady Seaweed worked in television--maybe he can elaborate.) However it was done, Altman's reasons for doing so differed from Hawks and Welles, who simply wanted to cram as much exposition as they could in a scene. Exposition never concerned Altman much. It's impossible in practice but were a 30-something Ernest Hemingway to write a one-page synopsis of MASH or McCabe & Mrs. Miller or Nashville or A Wedding and turn it in to a community college teaching assistant for grading, he would get an F for having too many meandering sentences and not coming to the point. Even if some of his movies like The Long Goodbye, The Player, or Gosford Park had something resembling a plot, it was not narrative that Altman was after but a more immersive experience for the viewer. And a voyeuristic one as well. Not in the sense of looking through a peephole, but the voyeurism that we can't but participate in when we're amongst a crowd of people, and overhear little snatches of conversation, even inconsequential snatches of conversation that would otherwise bore us if we were being addressed to directly, but paradoxically intrigue us when absorbed secondhand. However, if you just as soon be by yourself and don't want anyone else around you, avoid this potentially absorbing collection of Robert Altman's signature conversation set pieces: 

Shhhhh! I'm trying to listen.

Zenith

Here's a between-the-world wars power couple for you, Sinclair Lewis and Dorothy Thompson. Husband and wife were equally famous in there day, but I'm afraid Thompson has more or less sunk into obscurity, whereas Lewis is still fairly well-known. This is due to the fact the latter is now part of the literary canon (thanks in large part to winning a Nobel), and if you take a college literature course, he's one of those dead white males you have to read if you want to pass, graduate, and get a job writing ad copy for electronic billboards. However, you don't really need to have Lewis forced upon you. You can read him simply because his 80, 90, and 100-year-old books are...readable. More than that, they're actually relevant. Works such Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, and Elmer Gantry satirize provincialism, materialism, pharmaceuticals, and born-again con men. Like I said, relevant. In fact, the current U.S. President could have come out of a Lewis novel.

Fiction is often written with an eye on posterity. You write it now and hope it can still be appreciated a hundred years hence. However, journalism, Dorothy Thompson's chosen profession, is written in the here and now. Of course, the subject matter journalists cover can be of interest 80 or 90 years hence, but as history, written by historians living a 80 or 90 years hence. The journalism of the here and now may very well still exist in those far-off history books, but as the footnotes and bibliography in the final pages, proof that the historian did his or her research. So if you're an avid footnote and bibliography reader, you've heard of Thompson. Or came across her in a biography of her husband. Or...you've read a biography of Thompson herself. There's been at least three in the 59 years since her death. She did a lot of living in what used to be the here and now.

 

Originally a suffragette, Thompson decided once she had the right to vote that learn a little bit about the world before pulling a lever for this candidate or that. Journalism seemed a good way to accomplish that. A foreign correspondent in Ireland, she interviewed a leader of the Sinn Féin party. She then headed for Vienna where she met John Gunther, a highly respected journalist of the day (though today he may be best known for the rather sad book Death Be Not Proud, about his son who died of cancer.) For a while she was the Chief of the Central European Service for the Philadelphia Public Ledger. Two years later she switched to the New York Post (this was decades before Rupert Murdoch got his greedy little hands on it), and became head of its Berlin bureau, where she witnessed the rise of National Socialism, better known as Nazism. In 1931, she interviewed Adolf Hitler, who at the time something akin to a congressman. He failed to impress Thompson, who described him in her subsequent book I Saw Hitler as the "very prototype of the little man." Once the little man became Chancellor (akin at first to a president, then to a dictator), he had Thompson kicked out of the country, and then spent the rest of the 1930s and the first half of the 1940s looking for ways to impress her. No, no, no, I shouldn't lay all that on Thompson. Hitler clearly had issues, even as people to this day disagree what those issues were (rejection to art school? Syphilis? A missing testicle?) Back home in the United States, Thompson was asked to write a column for the New York Tribune titled "On the Record". Soon carried by more than 170 newspapers, giving her a readership of over ten million people, she became one of the most popular syndicated columnists, and the second most popular syndicated female columnists behind First Lady Elinor Roosevelt. NBC took notice, and hired Thompson as a radio commentator. Thompson didn't waste her fame on trivialities, as she became a leading spokesperson against the rise of fascism. What did her husband think about all that? Lewis was worried about fascism, too, and not just its rise in Europe. He wrote a novel in 1935 titled It Can't Happen Here about an American dictator (according to Amazon, there's been a spike in sales of late. I can't imagine why.)

Unfortunately, their shared political beliefs wasn't enough to save the marriage. it lasted just 14 years and produced one child, a son. What went wrong? Here's one clue. Lewis joked to his friend, the journalist John Hersey (best known for the book Hiroshima), that he was going to divorce Dorothy Thompson and name Adolf Hitler as a co-respondent. Of course, no such assignation took place. I take it to mean that Lewis didn't like all the globetrotting his wife's job required. Should we then see Sinclair Lewis as a male chauvinist who though a woman's place was in the home? That would be at odds with both his literary output and his romantic life. Lewis was attracted to career women (his wife before Thompson was also one) and this is reflected in his novels. In fact, the heroine in Main Street is a career woman. That book and others he wrote further criticizes a society that forces women to be stay-at-home wives, some 40 years before Betty Friedan made the same argument. Then again, writing about career women in the abstract is one thing. Marrying one may have caused him to blink.

There were other problems, like infidelity. Thompson had affairs with both men and women. Despite Lewis' rather ghoulish appearance (hoping to rid his face of acne scars, he tried expensive radium therapy that only made things worse), he used his fame as a novelist to bed a girl on occasion. But his real mistress was the bottle. An alcoholic long before he met Thompson, Lewis would pass out in the midst of social gatherings, embarrassing Thompson. He also sometimes passed out in their bedroom, which brought it own humiliation. But even minus adultery or booze, the union might not have lasted. They were both writers but different types of writers, he a novelist, she a journalist. Novelists tend, and are even compelled, to be homebodies, with as limited contact with the world as possible (which is why some of the more successful ones end up in cabins in the woods.) Journalists, on the other hand, often work erratic hours and are away from home quite a bit. These two just didn't see each other all that often, and sometimes absence makes the heart grow fouler. The divorce finally came in 1942, albeit without Hitler's name being dragged into it. Some things fortunately don't happen here.

 


 

 

   

All the News That Fits

In 1992, Rolling Stone sent what it called its "National Affairs team" to a cafe in Little Rock, Arkansas to interview the Democratic nominee for president, whom the magazine was also endorsing. Let's see who's at that table in the above picture, going from (literally, but not, politically) right to left.

That's Bill Clinton on the (again, not politically) far right. You may recall he won that election.

To the (literal, but, excepting issues involving gun ownership, not the political) right of Clinton is Hunter S. Thompson. A former newspaper reporter, Thompson first achieved notoriety in 1967 when he wrote a book on the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang, a tome that ends with him getting beat up by one of its members. As odd a piece of reportage as that may sound, it was written in conventional journalistic prose. Not so his next notable piece, an article that appeared in the short-lived, far-left Scanlon's Monthly. Not so much about the Kentucky Derby as the drunks in the stands watching the Kentucky Derby, it introduced a new style of writing called "Gonzo journalism." Though Gonzo may have had its antecedents in the satirical journalism of Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, and H.L. Mencken, Thompson added something new to the genre: he claimed, quite convincingly, to be stoned out of his mind while doing his reporting, resulting in sex-drugs-and-rock and roll blur of fact and fiction. As provocative as all that sounds, the article was as little-read as the magazine it appeared in. But it caught the eye of the editor of the aforementioned Rolling Stone, a magazine dedicated to the then thriving counterculture music scene. Thompson and the impressionist artist-cartoonist who had illustrated his Scanlon's story, Ralph Steadman, was invited to do something for RS. This became perhaps the most famous piece to ever to appear in the magazine, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" , later a book, about a trip Thompson took with his 300-pound Samoan attorney (in reality, a stocky Chicano.) The next year he and Steadman were asked to cover the 1972 presidential election. A wildly successful series of articles, and eventually a best-selling book, focusing mostly on the Democratic primaries and convention, it got Thompson a place on the Rolling Stone masthead as the head of the "National Affairs Desk" (while his alter ego, Raoul Duke, manned the "Sports Desk".) At most magazines that would usually mean news coming out of Washington, but Thompson took a more sweeping view of the term. Take Roxanne Pulitzer's divorce, which he hilariously covered. Affairs, yes. I'm just not sure how national they were. But the 1972 presidential race certainly had national implications, and that's why Thompson was at that table with Bill Clinton, who, in the opinion of some, used Thompson for his own advantage. Like just about every Democratic candidate since 1932, Clinton was characterized by the Republicans as a wild-eyed radical leftist. To prove that he was middle-of-the-road, Clinton had proposed a law enforcement bill that would add 100,000 policemen to American cities. Such a proposal was anathema to Thompson, who had witnessed the beatings of protesters at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago and had taken a dim view of law enforcement ever since.  He expressed those concerns to Clinton, who would have none of it, claiming that African-Americans--in his writings, Thompson had often criticized the white power structure--that he had talked to in Little Rock all supported an increase in policemen. Whether they did or not, Clinton had successfully positioned himself to the right of a counterculture hero at a time when the Republican Party was trying to inaccurately paint the Democratic Party as being an arm of that (by then almost nonexistent) counterculture.

In the center of that Little Rock cafe table, we find Rolling Stone's founding publisher and editor Jann Wenner. In the views of many he was also in the center politically by 1992. Starting out as a music critic for Ramparts, a one-time Roman Catholic literary magazine that had been transformed into a New Left muckraking news journal by its one-eyed editor, Warren  Hinckle (who later founded, published, and edited the aforementioned Scanlon's Monthly), Wenner came to the conclusion he was better at critiquing his fellow music critics than critiquing music itself.  With the help of his mentor/father figure, music journalist Ralph Gleason, he started Rolling Stone, which at first glance--it's now 1967--looked like any other underground hippie rag found on the head shop newspaper rack. Yet the prose inside this hippie rag was so good that it soon came to be regarded as a rock music New Yorker. But once the counterculture had waned, many of the best writers had left (often because the mercurial Wenner had fired them), and Wenner had immersed himself socially in the world of celebrity, the magazine after 1980 or so threatened to turn into a rock music People. So maybe all the attention paid to the 1992 campaign was a way of returning the magazine to its 1972 campaign heyday. Now, Wenner may not have been as politically moderate, or, the real meaning behind the charge, as politically conservative, as his critics insisted, for in the Democratic primaries, Rolling Stone had endorsed Jerry Brown. Despite favoring a potentially regressive flat tax devised for him by supply-side economist Arthur Laffer, Brown had basically positioned himself on the Left by refusing any campaign contribution of more than $100, and reminding everybody, usually in the middle of televised debates, of an 800 number they could call if they wanted to donate any spare change to the candidate. Surprisingly, Brown proved to be Clinton's toughest opponent, winning a primary here and there. Clinton clinched the nomination anyway, but it still didn't hurt to have a former Brown supporter like Wenner on his side.

Now, to the left of Wenner, but politically to the right of everyone else, is P.J. O'Rourke. A former writer for the National Lampoon, in the early 1980s he was named head of the Rolling Stone "Foreign Affairs Desk", but he wrote quite frequently about domestic affairs as well. He's been described by himself and just about everyone else as the RS token conservative, and there may be some truth to that. Voters under 25--Rolling Stone's target audience--chose Reagan over Mondale by 2-to-1 in 1984 election, so a little tokenism at the time might have made good business sense, and no conservative was better suited to the magazine than O'Rourke. He's often been compared to Hunter S. Thompson, but I've always found both writers to be quite different. Thompson's prose was mostly stream-of-consciousness played for laughs. Despite some occasional salty language and scatological references, O'Rourke took the more traditional route of a humorist: one-liners. He was less a right-wing Hunter Thompson and more a right-wing Dave Barry. There also was a certain difference of experience between Thompson and O'Rourke that wasn't entirely political but played into their political views. For instance, both Thompson and O'Rourke have admitted to taking drugs (not that such an admission has ever gotten anyone ostracized in the offices of Rolling Stone.) But Thompson's drug-taking was in the here and now. What you read by him was on drugs. O'Rourke's drug-taking, however, was all in the past. As was his radicalism. In his prose, O'Rourke often makes mention of just how steeped he was in the 1960s counterculture during his college days.  But as I suspect was often the case with college students steeped in the 1960s counterculture, he was a Lefty Until Graduation (I'm tempted to call him a LUG, but that acronym has already been taken.) Once out of college, he took a turn to the Right and....I was going to finished that sentence with "never looked back" but he DID look back. And he looked back with that most conservative of desires: nostalgia. In a printed exchange between Thompson and O'Rourke, he admitted he rails against the 1960s because he misses them so much. And that, I think, was, and is, the key to his comedy. If he no longer had any use for the ideology of the counterculture, he could still apply its anarchic spirit to his right-wing punditry, making him a hip, edgy alternative to George Will or William F. Buckley. It also meant he could attract readers across the political spectrum. Such as me. I didn't at all share his political views--I was one voter under 25 who chose Mondale over Reagan in the 1984 election--but I still found O'Rourke funny as hell. So funny that when I found out that he was going to give a talk at a Borders bookstore not far from where I lived, I made a point of being there. He attracted a big crowd, and there was a long line after the talk, but I did get to meet him. He seemed friendly enough. As he signed my book ("To Kirk Bon Appetit! P.J. O'Rourke 9/22/98"), I asked him whatever became of the National Lampoon. Betraying a bit of annoyance, not towards me personally but at the thought of what happened, he explained that some scumbag--his characterization, not mine--had bought the name just so he could make movies with National Lampoon in the title, and published the actual magazine just once a year to keep the copyright fresh (ironically, the book O'Rourke was signing was Eat the Rich, an endorsement of the free enterprise system.) Now, this was 21 years ago. Two right-wing presidencies, several right-wing congresses, and a few right-wing acts of violence later, I'm not so sure I'd want to see him if he showed up at some local bookstore (which at any rate wouldn't be Borders since the whole chain has gone belly up.) I wouldn't find him as funny. All that conservatism is to me now a very old, and very bad, joke. That said, I can't quite bring myself to throw away his book. After all, it has his autograph.

Now we come to the man on the very left. Politically, he also may have been to the left of everyone at that table, even Hunter Thompson (Thompson may have detested conservatism and the middle-of-the-road, but he was also against gun control, indifferent toward government programs, and once expressed admiration for The Fountainhead. I suspect the Left was more of a default position for him.) I'm talking about William Greider, at the time Rolling Stone's National Affairs Editor, who died just four days ago, on Christmas. Of all the writers who went down to Arkansas to see Clinton that day, according to what was printed in the magazine, Greider asked the most questions, and the most detailed questions at that. He came across as the most knowledgeable of the bunch, and wasn't the least bit daunted by Clinton's long, technocratic, policy wonk answers. In the most polite, almost scholarly way as possible, he held Clinton's feet to the fire in a way that   supposedly more formidable opponents like Thompson and O'Rourke were unable to do. But who exactly was this guy? A one-time writer and editor for the Washington Post (where it's said he coined the phrase "Nader's Raiders") Greider was one of the few reporters to befriend Hunter S. Thompson during the 1972 presidential campaign when just about everybody else on the press bus saw him as an underground newspaper interloper. When, in the early 1980s, Jann Wenner went looking for a National Affairs Editor to augment the "National Affairs Desk", Thompson (according to Thompson) suggested Greider, who was eager to leave the mainstream news media behind him. Actually, by that time, Rolling Stone was pretty mainstream itself, but Greider figured he he'd have a bit more freedom, and he did. He wasn't nearly as funny as Thompson or Rourke. Actually, he wasn't funny at all, but he was impassioned and cerebral, politically committed and knowledgeable. You don't often see that combination in one writer. It's usually either emotion OR  intellect, take your pick. But Greider was Spock and McCoy rolled into one, with a little bit of Captain Kirk, too (after all, he was an editor), and that made him, for me, a joy to read. Now I said he was politically committed. What I mean by that is that he was on the Left when the Left had fallen out of favor and remained out of favor until...well, we'll see what the next election brings. But what I most learned from him is just because you don't like what the Right is doing doesn't mean you have to give that proxy for the Left, the Democratic Party, a free pass. Do so and they'll just become a more benign version of the Right. Greider backed up his beliefs with all kinds of facts and figures, but always kept his prose lively. He was a political science professor on a soapbox.

William Greider 1936-2019

    

    

In Memoriam: Tom Wolfe 1930-2018

“Saturation Reporting”

“The Right Stuff ”

"The Me Decade"

“Good Ol’ Boy”

"Catching Flak"

"Radical Chic"

"Social X-Ray"

"Pushing the Envelope"

"Fuhgeddaboudit"

"New Journalism"

--Terms coined, or at least popularized, by Tom Wolfe. 

 Wolfe grew up in Richmond, Virginia.

After graduating cum laude, i.e., in the top 25% of his class (Wolfe majored in English), from Washington and Lee University in Virginia, he earned his PhD at...

...at Yale University, but it didn't come easy. He had to rewrite his thesis on American communists, changing it from a subjective to an objective point of view, before it was finally accepted. Wolfe was chagrined that what he believed to be the inferior thesis is what got his his doctorate. The conflict between subjectivity and objectivity, and his predilection for the former over the latter, would one day earn him a regular spot on the best-seller lists. 

 Wolfe decided to go into journalism, first with the Springfield Union in Massachusetts, and then with the Washington Post, first at the city desk, and then as correspondent in Cuba...

 
 ...earning a Writers Guild award for reporting on a change of administrations.

In 1962, Wolfe moved to New York City, where he would reside for the rest of his days.

In a city of more than 7 million people, it's not always easy to stand out, but the nattily-attired Wolfe found a way, favoring white suits all year long.

 With plenty of time on his hands during a newspaper strike in 1962, Wolfe pitched a story to Esquire about Southern California's hot rod and custom car culture. But once he got the assignment, he procrastinated, feeling the who-what-where-when-and-why mechanics of traditional journalism that he had always chafed against wouldn't do the subject justice. With a deadline looming, he decided to let his reportorial hair down. 

The first good look I had at customized cars was at an event called a "Teen Fair," held in Burbank, a suburb of Los Angeles beyond Hollywood. This was a wild place to be taking a look at art objects—eventually, I should say, you have to reach the conclusion that these customized cars are art objects, at least if you use the standards applied in a civilized society. But I will get to that in a moment.

Anyway, about noon you drive up to a place that looks like an outdoor amusement park, and there are three serious-looking kids, like the cafeteria committee in high school, taking tickets, but the scene inside is quite mad. Inside, two things hit you. The first is a huge platform a good seven feet off the ground with a hully-gully band—everything is electrified, the bass, the guitars, the saxophones—and (two) behind the band, on the platform, about two hundred kids are doing frantic dances called the hully-gully, the bird, and the shampoo. As I said, it's noontime. The dances the kids are doing are very jerky. The boys and girls don't touch, not even with their hands. They just ricochet around. Then you notice that all the girls are dressed exactly alike. They have bouffant hairdos—all of them—and slacks that are, well, skintight does not get the idea across; it's more the conformation than how tight the slacks are. It's as if some lecherous old tailor with a gluteus-maximus fixation designed them, striation by striation.

A new style was born--or I should say new styles, as in the next few years Wolfe would write in whatever idiom the subculture he was reporting on required.

A decade later, Wolfe and others would call it "New Journalism", what we today might call "creative nonfiction", the practice of using certain literary techniques usually found in fiction to report on something that takes place in real life. It wasn't necessarily as new as all that. You could trace it all the way back to Mark Twain's Life in the Mississippi (1883.) More recently, but prior to the 1960s, there had been The Cruise of the Snark (1911) by Jack London, The Education of Henry Adams (1918) by Henry Adams, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) by Gertrude Stein, and Hiroshima (1946) by John Hersey. But those were few and far between. It was really in the 1960s that the genre picked up steam. Among those working, and writing on, the same side of the street as Wolfe were Norman Mailer (Armies of the Night, 1968), Joan Didion (Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1968), Gay Talese ("Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" Esquire, 1966), George Plimpton (Paper Lion, 1966),  and, most successfully, Truman Capote (In Cold Blood, 1966.) But Wolfe pulled ahead of all of them when he turned to a literary and artistic movement that...

..a first seemed like just a passing fad...

 ...but instead was the harbinger of a cultural movement that came to characterize (and caricature) the 1960s. 

Ken Kesey, best known for the 1960 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. That is, as an AUTHOR he's best known for. But by the end of the '60s, he may have achieved even greater fame as a CHARACTER in a book. Here's how it came about. In 1965, Kesey was arrested for possession of marijuana. There's nothing like a celebrity behind bars to attract the attention of the media, and one member of the media particularly attracted to the story was Tom Wolfe. During a jailhouse interview, Kesey told Wolfe an amazing story of how he had spent the last few years. Back in the 1950s, when he was working as a night aid at a veterans hospital, he agreed to serve as a guinea pig in a...

...government-funded study of the effects of a hallucinatory drug called...

  

 ...lysergic acid diethylamide, or, for short...

...LSD.

In recent years the CIA has come under criticism for the use of torture, but back in the late 1950s, Kesey had no complaint about his treatment at the secretive agency's hands. Indeed, he enjoyed the experience so much, he decided to share it with the world. With the money he earned from Cuckoo's Nest, he bought a bus, name it Further, had it painted psychedelic colors (before the term psychedelic colors had even been coined) and enlisted a bunch of hippie-types, whom he dubbed Merry Pranksters, to travel around the Great State of California and beyond, and help turn people on to the then-legal drug in staged events known as...

 ..."acid tests".

At one such event, refreshments were served.

Kesey served six months at a prison farm, where he was frequently visited by Wolfe. The journalist was also interviewed many of Kesey's friends.

In case you're wondering why I brought up the Beats earlier, it's because I've always felt the book Wolfe would eventually write about all this bore a slight resemblance to Jack Kerouac's 1956 novel On the Road, and indeed there was a connecting strand. Kerouac's fictional Dean Moriarty was based on the nonfictional writer and bus driver Neal Cassady. The title of Wolfe's On the Road update?

  

They were...well, Beautiful People! - not 'students', 'clerks', 'salesgirls', 'executive trainees' - Christ, don't give me your occupation-game labels! We are Beautiful People, ascendant from your robot junkyard

Everybody, everybody everywhere, has his own movie going, his own scenario, and everybody is acting his movie out like mad, only most people don’t know that is what they’re trapped by, their little script

The world was simply and sheerly divided into 'the aware', those who had the experience of being vessels of the divine, and a great mass of 'the unaware', 'the unmusical', 'the unattuned.'

 YOU ARE HEREBY EMPOWERED!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Pranksters never talked about synchronicity by name, but they were more and more attuned to the principle. Obviously, according to this principle, man does not have free will. There is no use in his indulging in a lifelong competition to change the structure of the little environment he seems to be trapped in. But one could see the larger pattern and move with it - Go with the flow! - and accept it and rise above one's immediate environment and even alter it by accepting the larger pattern and growing with it.

...a perception of the cosmic unity of this higher level. And a feeling of timelessness, the feeling that what we know as time is only the result of a naive faith in causality - the notion that A in the past caused B in the present, which will cause C in the future, when actually A, B, and C are all part of a pattern that can be truly understood only by opening the doors of perception and experiencing it... in this moment... this supreme moment... this Kairos.

Somewhere in that journalistic account, I'm sure there was a who-what-where-when-and-why. 

Did Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test? One of the Merry Pranksters is named Zonker.

New York Philharmonic conductor and Broadway composer Leonard Bernstein would have turned 100 this year. Back in 1970, when he was still in his early 50s, he and his wife Felicia decided to throw a fundraiser for the Black Panthers, some of whose members were under arrest and awaiting trial for conspiring to kill policemen, set off bombs, and other violent mischief. As some of the bails were set as high as $100,000, the Bernsteins saw it as a civil liberties issue, and invited about 90 well-heeled guests, including Richard Avedon, Otto Preminger, Betty Comden, and Aaron Copland to their Park Avenue residence to hear the Panthers plead their case. Tom Wolfe wasn't invited but was let in anyway. The Black Panthers mingling with society swells struck Wolfe as incongruous, or, to put it bluntly, funny:

 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 here on the hors d’oeuvre trail? Do the Panthers like little Roquefort cheese morsels wrapped 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 . . . The butler will bring them their drinks . . . Deny it if you wish to, but such are the pensées métaphysiques that rush through one’s head on these Radical Chic evenings just now in New York. For example, does that huge Black Panther there in the hallway, the one shaking hands with Felicia Bernstein herself, the one with the black leather coat and the dark glasses and the absolutely unbelievable Afro, Fuzzy Wuzzy-scale in fact—is he, a Black Panther, going on to pick up a Roquefort cheese morsel rolled in crushed nuts from off the tray, from a maid in uniform, and just pop it down the gullet without so much as missing a beat of Felicia’s perfect Mary Astor voice. . . .

 As strange as that gathering might have seemed to Wolfe, Lenny's instincts proved correct, as the 21 Panthers accused of wrongdoing were acquitted on all charges. But by that time the term "radical chic" was already part of the lexicon. And in coming years there would be such variations as "terrorist chic", "libertarian chic", "killer chic", and "heroin chic".

In 1972, Wolfe was assigned by Rolling Stone to cover the launch of Apollo 17, the last time a man went to the moon. This got him thinking about the space program as a whole, and decided to write a book about not only the original Mercury Seven astronauts, but also the more gravity-bound test pilots who helped pave the way, such as Chuck Yeager, the first mas to break the sound barrier.

 Nevertheless, there was something extraordinary about it when a man so young, with so little experience in flight test, was selected to go to Muroc Field in California for the XS–1 project. Muroc was up in the high elevations of the Mojave Desert. It looked like some fossil landscape that had long since been left behind by the rest of terrestrial evolution. It was full of huge dry lake beds, the biggest being Rogers Lake. Other than sagebrush the only vegetation was Joshua trees, twisted freaks of the plant world that looked like a cross between cactus and Japanese bonsai. They had a dark petrified green color and horribly crippled branches. At dusk the Joshua trees stood out in silhouette on the fossil wasteland like some arthritic nightmare. In the summer the temperature went up to 110 degrees as a matter of course, and the dry lake beds were covered in sand, and there would be windstorms and sandstorms right out of a Foreign Legion movie. At night it would drop to near freezing, and in December it would start raining, and the dry lakes would fill up with a few inches of water, and some sort of putrid prehistoric shrimps would work their way up from out of the ooze, and sea gulls would come flying in a hundred miles or more from the ocean, over the mountains, to gobble up these squirming little throwbacks. A person had to see it to believe it: flocks of sea gulls wheeling around in the air out in the middle of the high desert in the dead of winter and grazing on antediluvian crustaceans in the primordial ooze. 

 After all, the right stuff was not bravery in the simple sense of being willing to risk your life (by riding on top of a Redstone or Atlas rocket). Any fool could do that (and many fools would no doubt volunteer, given the opportunity), just as any fool could throw his life away in the process. No, the idea (as all pilots understood) was that a man should have the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line and have the moxie, the reflexes, the experience, the coolness, to pull it back at the last yawning moment—but how in the name of God could you either hang it out or haul it back if you were a lab animal sealed in a pod?

“Well … things are beginning to stack up a little,” said Gordo. It was the same old sod-hut drawl. He sounded like the airline pilot who, having just slipped two seemingly certain mid-air collisions and finding himself in the midst of a radar fuse-out and control-tower dysarthria, says over the intercom: “Well, ladies and gentlemen, we’ll be busy up here in the cockpit making our final approach into Pittsburgh, and so we want to take this opportunity to thank you for flying American and we hope we’ll see you again real soon.” It was second-generation Yeager, now coming from earth orbit. Cooper was having a good time. He knew everybody was in a sweat down below. But this was what he and the boys had wanted all along, wasn’t it?

Truman Capote and Norman Mailer started out as fiction writers, and then gravitated to non-fiction. Tom Wolfe did just the opposite. Sometime in the 1980s, it occurred to him that novelistic techniques might work best in an actual novel:

 Sherman McCoy, a successful Wall Street bond trader who likes to think of himself as a Master of the Universe, finds out he's anything but when he takes the wrong exit off the freeway in a sprawling socioeconomic comedy that skews the rich and the poor alike (though not always to the same degree.)

 [H]e could see the island of Manhattan off to the left. The towers were jammed together so tightly, he could feel the mass and stupendous weight. Just think of the millions, from all over the globe, who yearned to be on that island, in those towers, in those narrow streets! There it was, the Rome, the Paris, the London of the twentieth century, the city of ambition, the dense magnetic rock, the irresistible destination of all those who insist on being where things are happening-and he was among the victors!

 Something hits the Mayor on the shoulder. It hurts like hell! There on the floor-a jar of mayonnaise, an eight-ounce jar of Hellmann's mayonnaise. Half full! Half consumed! Somebody has thrown a half-eaten jar of Hellmann's mayonnaise at him! In that instant the most insignificant thing takes over his mind. Who in the name of God would bring a half-eaten eight-ounce jar of Hellmann's mayonnaise to a public meeting?

How the stories circulated on every campus! If you weren’t making $250,000 a year within five years, than you were either grossly stupid or grossly lazy. That was the word. By age 30, $500,000–and that sum had the taint of the mediocre. By age forty you were either making a million a year or you were timid and incompetent. Make it now! That motto burned in every heart, like myocarditis.

 Then it dawned on Kramer. The cops weren’t all that much different from the assistant D.A.s. It was the muck factor. The cops got tired of packing blacks and Latins off to jail all day, too. It was even worse for them, because they had to dive deeper into the muck to do it. The only thing that made it constructive was the idea that they were doing it for somebody—for the decent people. So they opened their eyes, and now they were attuned to all the good people with colored skin…who rose to the top…during all this relentless stirring of the muck… You couldn’t exactly call it enlightenment, thought Kramer, but it was a fucking start.

 If a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who's been arrested.

Subjectivity vs. Objectivity. Tom Wolfe favored the former, but I would argue that he achieved both. Subjectivity is something written from a particular point of view, and Objectivity is said to be the opposite. Well, everything Wolfe wrote tended to be from the point of view of whatever person, or persons, he was writing about, so that makes it subjective. But as that person's or persons point of view was rarely Wolfe's own,  he had to maintain some kind of objectivity to get it right. After all, Wolfe wasn't a hot rod enthusiast, record producer, good ol' boy NASCAR driver, Merry Prankster (he never even tried LSD), astronaut, or Wall Street bond trader, even if reading what he wrote about those folks, he might convince you otherwise. Though a book about it made him rich, Wolfe was never a true counterculture figure like Hunter S. Thompson. In fact, he seems to have been skeptical about the social upheaval of the 1960s. Beginning with Radical Chic in 1970, a certain reactionary tone seeped into his work, causing some critics to label him a conservative, a charge he always denied. In a 2012 interview, Wolfe claimed with the exception of George W. Bush in 1992, every time he had voted for President, that person had won. Assuming that he started voting soon after turning 21 (pre-26th Amendment), that would mean Wolfe chose Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 and again in '56; John F. Kennedy in 1960; Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964; Richard M. Nixon in 1968 and again in 1972; Jimmy Carter in 1976; Ronald Reagan in 1980 and again in '84; George H.W. Bush in 1988; Bill Clinton in 1996; George W. Bush in 2000 and again in '04; and Barack Obama in 2008. Like Chrissie Hynde, the middle of the road is where you'd most likely find Wolfe.

Whatever his politics, Tom Wolfe was no conservative when it came to prose. There he was a true radical. And, for a time, it made him chic.