Radical Chic (Tom Wolfe)

Man, I love that stream-of-consciousness style.  It really does paint the room, and even the subjective experience of the room.  And I've found the less carefully you read-- the more you just let the words stream in-- the clearer the picture.

Maybe I just know a lot more than I did before, but it was surprising how familiar the names were in comparison to those in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.  Leonard Bernstein, Barbara Walters, William F. Buckley.  Cool stuff.

Biting commentary on the whole idea of high society.  Intended that way?  Isn't Tom Wolfe a member of high society?

The political tensions are clear enough.  It's probable that social gulfs can't be bridged in one evening.  What progress did they actually expect to make?

Loved the continued insistence at the end that it was a "meeting, not a party."  Oh, but the white servants...

I was taken aback by the final turn of the tale.  In the end, the movers and shakers lost control of their image, and of the story.  A good lesson there: With status comes notoriety, but not necessarily a whole lot of power.  Trend-setters can set the trends within those arenas that others look to them to set trends.  But political trends come from elsewhere.  Or were they simply trying to plant the next flag against an up-and-coming new wave of high society-- was it merely a social experiment?  Simply a gamble-- within their own world-- that didn't pay off?

I'd like to see Buckley's essay about the meeting.

One theme that has bothered me more and more in general, and that struck me in particular in the essay (so I might as well bring it up now): I don't think I understand the psychology of identity politics.  Meaning, I genuinely don't think of myself as represented by, or representative of, any class at all.  That's easy enough to say as a white middle-class man, but it applies to those minority groups of which I am a part as well-- I never felt nor do I feel personally implicated in any criticism of the Catholic Church, for instance.  In the realm of abstraction, I'll think through arguments implicating the abstract idea.  And I'll take note of how other individuals within the group are treated as individuals.  But I never feel like the abstract idea has much of an effect on me.  In the end, I see myself as an individual who works and lives, and is treated in a certain way by the people I interact with, and take those interactions as significant only for myself-- because how could the other person actually be acting as if they are interacting with an abstraction?  How could I?

So what am I doing wrong?  Because given the way other people talk and write about the way they see and behave in the world, it often feels like I'm missing out on something big.