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Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers

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"Radical Chic and Mau-mauing the Flak Catchers" is comprised of two short essays written by Tom Wolfe and first published in book form in 1970. While much has changed over the last three decades in America regarding the topic of race, the essays of this book are just as applicable now as they were when Wolfe wrote them.

"Radical Chic" is the story of a party thrown by Leonard Bernstein to raise money for the Black Panthers; specifically, for their legal defenses. Wolfe lets their own words and actions at this typical party be the objects by which these elite, Manhattanite, "limousine liberals" completely humiliate themselves. The lengths to which the Bernstein crowd goes--from whom they employ to what they wear--to remove anything that could possibly be viewed as "intolerant" is simply comical to almost anyone except for this crowd. As one who currently lives in New York City, this book was hilarious to read since any differences between the crowd Wolfe satirized in 1970 and the Manhattanite left-wing elitists of today, are virtually non-existent. As "Radical Chic" closes, this crowd is sent scrambling to distance themselves from the Panthers, not because the Panthers were anarchist street thugs, but because they are shown to be virulent racists, especially regarding anti-Semitism. Upper class Leftists, scrambling to distance themselves from the anti-Semitic comments of black leaders they once supported politically... my, how things have changed.

While "Radical Chic" is the longer and usually more famous of the two essays, "Mau-mauing the Flak Catchers" is Wolfe writing at a better, more colorful level than in "Radical Chic", where the essay's subjects do most of the talking. In "Flak Catchers" Wolfe again takes on the topic of angry minorities and their more affluent supporters in the white community. This time, Wolfe uses the racial melting-pot in San Francisco to show the numerous "impoverished" groups uniting to make themselves seen and heard by the local government. Wolfe demonstrates his perspicacity in putting a human face on these groups and objectively showing their personal motives for giving the white government office workers (the Flak Catchers), an occasional shakedown. But here too, Wolfe is not commenting on the minority group nearly as much as he is on the white, middle class, Northern Californians that seek to appease these groups at any cost. His cynical view of these people comes not from disagreement with their wanting to help the less fortunate, but from their complete phoniness, which ultimately blinds them to the acts and words of some nefarious characters.

As Wolfe writes in "Flak Catchers": "You'd turn on the TV, and there would be some dude you had last seen just hanging out on the corner with the porkpie hat scrunched down over his eyes and the toothpick nodding on his lips--and there he was now on the screen, a leader, a 'black spokesman,' with whites in the round-shouldered suits and striped neckties holding microphones up to his mouth and waiting for The Word to fall from his lips."

Exactly.

Tom Wolfe's singular brand of commentary reached it sharp, devastating pinnacle in this biting portrait of that pitiable creature - the wealthy white liberal. With verve, a strong metaphorical flourish, and a ready ability to move the story forward, Wolfe finely details a party that was intended to embody the ethos of an era, and unwittingly did.

This party on January 14, 1970 (Woodstock and the flag on the moon are dissipating euphorium; Altamont is a fresh bruise) brings crafty, radical, violent Black Panthers into the lair of America's great conductor Leonard Bernstein for a fund-raiser.

It's all here: the saccharine philosophizing, the goofy earnestness, the willful suspension of reasoning, even the seeds of the increasingly acrimonious relationship between America's blacks and Jews.

Wolfe adroitly draws the scene for us:

"[Black Panther speaker] Cox seizes the moment: `Our Minister of Defense, Huey P. Newton, has said if we can't find a meaningful life.. you know... maybe we can have a meaningful death... and one reason the power structure fears the Black Panthers is that they know the Black Panthers are ready to die for what they believe in, and a lot of us have already died.'
Lenny seems like a changed man. He looks up at Cox and says, `When you walk into this house, into this building' - and he gestures vaguely as if to take it all in, the moldings, the sconces, the Roquefort morsels rolled in crushed nuts, the servants, the elevator attendant and the doormen downstairs in their white dickeys, the marble lobby, the brass struts on the marquee out front - "when you walk into this house, you must feel infuriated!'
Cox looks embarrasses. `No, man... I manage to overcome that... That's a personal thing...'...
`Well,' says Lenny, `it makes me mad!'

The self-loathing, the fashionable decrial of one's own self, yet the never quite-so-brave as to deny it. As this is a short, short work, I can't reveal too much more without giving away the entire plotline, which is awfully enjoyable for you to watch unfold.

I will say that this is Tom Wolfe writing at its boldest, full-throated best. Wolfe has a way of fetishizing a particular object and using it to illuminate the differences among his subjects. He does this to great effect here with the "Roquefort morsels rolled in crushed crumbs" mentioned above, and it is a delight to watch this talented polemicist run this device through its paces.

All the blurbs on the back of this book deem this a "sociological" work, which must have been a Word-in-Vogue at the time of its publishing. This is a hell of a lot more interesting than any sociology, and more important in its way too.

Now, let's be clear on what you're getting here - this is basically a long magazine article that even with small book format, generous margins and gutter-sized line spacing only runs to four score and two pages. Hence the need to include the entirely adequate "Mau-mauing the Flak-catchers" to bulk it up to a more decorous triple-digit page count.

Nonetheless, this is an enjoyable, easy-breezy read that you can knock off on a short plane ride. I read it in conjunction with Painted Word and From Bauhaus to Our House over a weekend, and I'd suggest getting all three.

This is probably Wolfe's best work as a pamphleteer and certainly his most famous. A fine, devious, dramatic work, this little tome will please the lover of politics, culture, gossip or Americana immensely.

These are two long essays dealing with Race in America in the late 1960's. Radical Chic is the more famous of the two. Imagine the scene as Leonard Bernstien and his wife throw a cocktail party in their posh Manhattan Apartment with members of the Black Panther Party as the guests of honor. Wolfe was present at this strange event and offers a play by play of how Radical became all the Chic in the New York social scene...briefly. Bernstien's reputation received national tarnish, and Wolfe explains it all in his witty and insightful style. The book takes a snapshot of the late 60's and Wolfe deconstructs it to explain:White Guilt, New York Society, Zeitgeist, Media Frenzy and other assorted Social-Pop phenomena. Radical Chic is a fun read and will explain a lot about how the better half understood the radicalism of the 60's. I actually prefer the lesser known Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. Anyone who has ever been involved in interest group politics will howl with laughter as angry minority youths confront pasty white bureaucrats in Oakland in the late 60's. This essay doesn't have the celebrity glamour of Radical Chic, but a lot more people have worked on local race and diversity issues than have made the Manhattan scene with Lenny Bernstien and the like. This essay really explains the purest democratization that was the result of the radical politics of the 60's.

I can't believe it took me this long to get around to reading this book. Here we see the rich and famous cavorting with violent anti-white, anti-American, and anti-Semitic criminals during the 1960s. It's hard to say who these pampered masochistic high society types hated more; themselves or their own people. Wolfe's recounting of Leonard Bernstein's "ode to the Panthers" party is outstanding. It's great journatlism. Heck, you know a situation is surreal when Barbara Walters is a voice of reason at a social gathering.

As a writer, Wolfe, could not possibly have done a better job. The narrator is everywhere but is not himself a character in the proceedings. He may be a fly on the wall but he is a fly that takes copious notes. The details are magnificent and he has a savant's eye for great quotations. You'll laugh, you'll rage, the limousine liberals and champagne socialists will astound you. The book was written over 30 years ago but it is just as applicable today as one could replace The Black Panthers with a nineties fellon like Mumia Abu Jamal. The section on mau-mauing, or the fine art of the racial shakedown, is totally priceless. It too is as applicable to the present as to the past. Wolfe foreshadows the great future successes of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson at coercing cash out of whites who willingly give it away to ease their politically correct minds. A magnificent effort and, at 10 bucks, the price isn't bad--a pity that he didn't write another 200 pages.

Take a half-cup of William F. Buckley, mix with a spoonful of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, stir in a dollop of David Horowitz, and leaven with a pinch of Hunter S. Thompson; boil, simmer, and stir----and you have Tom Wolfe, acerbic and acid observer of 20th century American society and possibly one of the keenest society writers since Ambrose Bierce. Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers is a slender little tome, with just 152 pages comprising two essays that cut to the quick of race and class relations in American society during the "Summer of Love." These two witty and mesmerizing little essays cut to the heart of the bizarre practice of society's elite espousing radical causes, and effectively capture and explain the seeming paradox of that strangest of modern beasts, the Limousine Liberal.

The first essay, "Radical Chic", is Wolfe's account of the high-society party thrown by New York Symphony conductor Leonard Bernstein and his wife for members of the Black Panthers, at the time a rising group of racialist incendiaries, revolutionaries, and terrorists. But as Wolfe points out, to the jaded, bored, decadent Central Park elite, they were exciting! Glamorous! Naughty! And highly fashionable, which is why the Thing to Do in New York High Society in 1969 was to throw penthouse parties for radicals.

What caused this? And why is it that so many of the affluent and wildly rich of today's American high society sport such radically leftist views, championing causes from banning fur to banning handguns to abolishing capitalism? According to Wolfe, it's a tactic of the newly rich called "nostalgie de la boue." Translated as "nostalgia for the mud", it takes the form of romanticizing the trappings, fashion, style, and even radical philosophies of the underclass in pursuit of irony, social aplomb, and prestige. While Wolfe doesn't mention this, even Marie Antoinette engaged in her own "nostalgie de la boue", meticulously recreating a 17th century French peasant village on the grounds of Versailles, where she and her ladies-in-waiting would play at being French peasant women.

"Radical Chic" takes the reader on a fascinating trip inside Bernstein's Park Avenue luxury apartment, but the reporter-style writing is actually drier than the more engaging "Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers." And best of all, "Radical Chic" offers a hysterical running dialogue between Lenny Bernstein and Black Panther Don Cox that Hollywood itself couldn't improve upon---with guest appearances by Barbara Walters, the Belafontes, and Otto Preminger!

"Mau Mau-ing the Flak Catchers" is more flamboyant, and, oddly enough, more interesting. "Mau-mauing" operates as a sort-of handbook for inner-city psychological against the "Man" (read: white middle-class social services bureaucrats) for fun, prizes, and most of all, money. Interestingly enough, Mau-Mauing (getting some friends and going down to the local social services office for a demonstration) played off white dread of the Racial Other, but Wolfe notes how effectively the largely white bureaucracy of the time used the system to co-opt the Revolutionaries. As Wolfe himself notes, "maybe the bureaucracy isn't so stupid at all. All they did is sacrifice one flak-catcher, and they've got hundreds, thousands."

Best of all, the second essay shows the early literary seedlings and ideas which would germinate in "Bonfire of the Vanities", including the idea of mau-mauing for fun and profit, wily social services operators who did (and do) understand the fear that white liberals have of appearing racist, the "pimp roll" and "pimp style" that infuriated Bonfire's young Assistant D.A., and even the Radical Chic parties that crop up in Bonfire and Wolfe's later novel, A Man in Full.

Both essays are fantastic reads, full of perceptive observations that illuminate how the Other Half was living the Summer of Love, and providing some insight into our own upside-down world of American race and class politics.

The cringing white liberal and the self-serving bureaucrat, the sychophantic Jewish silver-spoon socialist and the cunning black race-baiting political opportunist -- these are the types of characters that Tom Wolfe elucidates with wicked satire in his stories, which are a titillating admixture of acid fiction and scathing journalism. The types in this book, moreover, seem to be a fixture of the contemorary world, and their elucidation by Wolfe amounts to a humorous education in past forms. One cannot help but note that militant Islam receives the same perverted reception from several quarters as did the likes of the Black Panther movement of yore.

People of so many stripes rely on Tom Wolfe's reputation as a "conservative." For it, he's either canonized--one critic compared him to David Horowitz, which is absurd as Wolfe can write, not just spout off unsubstantiated opinions--or damned as a racist, etc., and all the other terms someone whose rhetoric is condemned as "conservative" is often called.

Despite whether Wolfe is "conservative" or not, he's a writer with a keen eye, and a sharp wit. As others have pointed out, the book consists of two essays, the first on an elite party---errr, "meeting"--at the residence of Leonard Bernstein and his wife designed as a fundraiser for the Black Panthers in the late 1960s. The second is on the activists largely of minority populations who used their constituents to set up job programs--which invariably meant long term jobs in the programs allegedly designed to alleviate poverty. Wolfe's metaphors had me laughing throughout the whole book.

I plan to give the book to many a friend who calls him or herself a "former radical." Some of us, as we've aged, have grown to see through what we once endeared.

True, the Bernsteins and others MEANT well...but they also had the maintain what is now known as "PC" symbols, e.g., non-black servants for the event. And they were out of their culture, and weren't sure how to respond to certain controversies. True, the anti-poverty programs were well-intended. But it seems some who criticized them as being self-perpetuating may have been right after all.

Despite my--or other critics'--political commentaries, the essays are, again, side-splitters. Even if you disagree with them, you won't be able to deny the quality of the writing, and the clarity of the observation.

And Wolfe's description of those doing the "mau mauing" was poetic genius. And it's true: they now

I read this years ago and rereading it now I am reminded of what a hilariously funny writer Wolfe is. Wolfe 's description of the super- in-radical chic crowd as they patronize and entertain the guntoting Black Panthers is ferociously clever. Wolfe analyzes what he calls 'nostalgie de boue' the 'nostalgia for the mud' and gives a brief course in the history of High Society in America. The old money always holds its nose as the new money until it it is replaced by it.
Wolfe is especially funny when he takes off on accents. Here is a small sample," Otto Preminger speaks up from the sofa where he's sitting, also just a couple of feet from (Black Panther) Cox. "He used one important word" then he looks at Cox'"you said zis is de most repressive country in de world. I don't beleef zat"
Wolfe gives us a blow- by - blow account of the famous party at the Bernstein's residence.He also tells of the aftemath when Charlotte Curtis gives her New York Times Report and the radical chic crowd is astonished to find themselves abandoned by the key institution of American liberalism, the 'New York Times Editorial Page'.
In the second essay Wolfe goes to the West Coast and describes the white liberal establishment encountering the newly militant minorities angered at the bureaucracy of the poverty program.
This is a funny funny and highly enjoyable book.

There probably hasn't been as good (and meaningful) a satire since the days of Jonathan Swift and Voltaire. Tom Wolfe was not the first to call attention to the radical chic phenomenon; journalist Eugene Lyons wrote about it approximately 25 years earlier, inventing the phrase "pent-house bolsheviks" to describe it. But no one can capture the real flavor of a scene like Wolfe, whose creative use of style and language makes it possible to be there without actually having been there.

Reading this book immediately called to mind the famous scene in Dostoevsky's POSSESSED (or, THE DEMONS; or, THE DEVILS), where a young nihilist--who says he has a plan to save mankind--is forced to announce, after thinking through the logic of his scheme, that it began with absolute freedom but ends with absolute despotism. The parlor radicals parodied by Wolfe were neither as serious about their radicalism nor as dedicated to it as genuine revolutionaries would be, but this is the whole point.

It might have spoiled the impact of this short book if Wolfe had speculated on WHY these limousine liberals found it so comforting to support radical causes, but one finds one's self wondering what Wolfe would have concluded about this.

Incidentally, there's a good non-fiction book on the Amazon site--GUILT, BLAME, AND POLITICS--that does exactly that, tracing the entire history of political radicalism and showing how it has always sprung from upper-class guilt, using a plethora of examples as evidence.

RADICAL CHIC is well worth reading even now, about 30 years after it was written, because we can still see the phenomenon at work -- like when multimillionaire Ted Turner recently said he considered himself "just a socialist at heart." Is it compassion that motivates these people, or guilt? Wolfe's excellent satire was a first step in learning how to distinguish between the two.

Wolfe is, admittedly, an aquired taste. In this early novel, the author explores race relations during the sixties between blacks and upper class whites in the toniest of New York's neighborhoods. With a flair for verbal word games, this slim volume explores the other side of the Electric Koolaide Acid Test, by pitting well-known black activists against the social movers and shakers of the day, and, in doing so, exposes the false bravado on both sides. This book is a must-have for Wolfe fans.