PUBLIC NUISANCES: Carter Wins Second Coogler/Tom Wolfe--Aha!
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
PUBLIC NUISANCES Carter Wins Second Coogler WASHINGTON ~ ACTS ARE FACTS, and such is the degree of politicization in the republic today that when a political organization announces a...
...He has oozed vitriol against America even while he was strutting on foreign soil...
...There he would stand, clutching his Coogler to his bosom and sermonizing until the janitors turned out the lights...
...In this tendentious book Jimmy actually accuses the Pope's anti-Communism of alienating Catholics who yearned for liberation theologythat is to say, Marxist theology...
...Turn to an interviewWolfe gave to the WallStreet Journal in March...
...The acerbic Harry Truman came to loathe President Dwight D. Eisenhower...
...He leapt from sociology to neuroscience to literature (he has a special place in his heart for the French "naturalist" Emile Zola) and on through history to elucidate The Human Beast, that is to say you and me...
...Most of these self-important eminences really are mere lumps...
...These are terrible things to be saying if you want to have any standing in the intellectual world...
...And though he is young he has already written several very good books, most recently the best-seller, IAm Charlotte Simmons...
...His name is Tom Wolfe...
...Why his world view would be explained as "bleak" is a mystery...
...In public, however, Harry minded his tongue...
...Well, let us face the matter boldly...
...They look alike, sound alike, and cower alike, when any writer with erudition and independence pronounces on the world around them, a world that they assume is their very special preserve...
...Thus Wolfe has written a great deal about intellectuals and in the future will be writing a great deal about hip hoppers, assuming they do not kill each other off...
...No other literary impostor can make that claim...
...His public criticisms ofsittingpresidents have been insulting and usually dishonest...
...He is actually a very peaceful man...
...Today, however, after a quarter century of caddish behavior towards his successors, it is perfectly acceptable...
...A favorite target of his is the "intellectual...
...That last statement would have been implausible a year or so after he vacated the White House...
...One of the reasons Wolfe fastens on the intellectual so frequentlyis that a major interest of his is "status...
...There the brightest young man of American letters said this: "I really love this country...
...No group in society more earnestly appropriates the constituent elements of status to "exalt" themselves in society than the intellectuals, though adepts of the "hip hop" culture run a close second...
...PUBLIC NUISANCES Carter Wins Second Coogler WASHINGTON ~ ACTS ARE FACTS, and such is the degree of politicization in the republic today that when a political organization announces a literary prize the perspicacious among us have a pretty good idea who the winner will be...
...Thus, you will not be surprised to hear that the conservative panel that annually awards the J. Gordon Coogler Award for the Worst Book of the Year has conferred the 2005 prize on Jimmy Carter...
...Intellectually this is the system where people tend to experiment more and their experiments are indulged...
...He even expressed a belief in UFOs, a preposterosity that Schlesinger and his ilk tend to forget...
...According to Wolfe, "the hip hop stars' status tests.., require shooting and assassinating one another periodically...
...How cool is that...
...Actually the sweeping that went on during Jimmy's years was the sweeping of anti-Western forces into power in places such as Afghanistan, Angola, Nicaragua, and forget not Iran...
...Wolfe-though still a pup-has already written three very good novels...
...Tom Wolfe--Aha...
...When Jimmy left office he was dismissed by liberals such as the historian Arthur Schlesinger for being so "conservative...
...Yes, but in social policy he was strictly New Age liberal...
...This is a common philistine response to Wolfe, provoked most likely because Wolfe laughs and because a certain kind of presumptuous lump always suspects that Wolfe is laughing at him, and occasionally at her...
...Probably he should have been made Coogler Laureate 20 times...
...The reviewer accused him of having a"verybleak world view...
...The next day in the Washington Post this bright young man received a very cranky review for his efforts...
...It has been gratifying to observe a wave of democratization sweep across our hemisphere and in other regions...
...He really is not encouraging shootings and assassinations...
...Only a man of bad character would write as he does in Our Endangered Values, "I announced that the protection of [human rights] would be the foundation of our country's foreign policy, and I persistently took action to implement this commitment...
...But for now he has the verve of his years and a strange wellspring of knowledge...
...JULY/AUGUST 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 79...
...He will be cautious and perhaps even conformist after the fashion of the intellectuals he loves to ridicule...
...Wolfe mentioned Noam Chomsky, the distinguished linguist who only became a certifiable intellectual when he began speaking out about the Vietnam War...
...In fact, no prior president has spoken as rudely and dishonestly of his successors or of his country as has Jimmy...
...In foreign policy he was a pompous procrastinator, lecturingAmericans on their"inordinate fear of Communism" 78 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY/AUGUST 2006 R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR...
...He is another howler voice in the chorus of the Angry Left, the Halitotic Left...
...Jimmy was the worst president in American history and, in personal terms, the most repellent...
...One of the reasons is that he is a man of demonstrably bad character...
...This is not Jimmy's first Coogler...
...He barely broke a sweat...
...That is a curious condition...
...I just marvel at how good it is, and obviously it's the simple principle of freedom...
...WASHINGTON T HE BRIGHTEST YOUNG LITERARY TALENT in America today skipped into our nation's capital in May to deliver the National Endowment for the Humanities' 35th annual Jefferson Lecture...
...Essentially, this Georgian Snopes is simply a backcountry huckster, much like Bill Clinton...
...The problem is, so vain is this insufferable huckster and so desperate has he become for notice that, as his presidency attracts ever more flies in history's dustbin, he is increasingly likely to show up at our Coogler Awards ceremony--whether invited or not...
...Well, perhaps when Wolfe puts on a few years he will not speak so brashly...
...Whatever we're doing I thinkwe've done it extremelywell...
...he wins the Worst Book of the Year Award-once again...
...Now it is probably crucial that we assure our reviewer from the Washington Post that Wolfe's question is ironic...
...He has nowwon the award twice...
...Worse, he might bring Rosalynn, an author in her own right...
...Jimmy has actually published 20 books now...
...Briefly put, status is the condition people presume themselves to be in owing t o - a s Wolfe said in his lecture-"education, manners, dress, cultivation, style of life," all of which "granted you your exalted place in society...
...Jimmy's presidential achievements were even more modest than those of Bill Clinton and of Gerald Ford, and his blunders on the domestic and foreign policy fronts are unsurpassed and possibly unsurpassable...
...As the prodigy put it in his lecture, the intellectual is "a person knowledgeable in one field who only speaks out in others...
...I just pray that the day of our gala ceremony he gets on the wrong Greyhoundbus...
...Now with this book he has adjusted once again...
...What is more, he writes bad books...
...Jimmy has repeatedly broken that rule...
...The democratization he deviously takes credit for did not begin until the mid-1980s with the military buildup of the Reagan administration and the demonstrated resolve of a president who, along with Lady Thatcher and Pope John Paul II, bankrupted the Soviets and their satellites without firing a shot...
...Before him no president criticized his government from foreign soil...
...Wolfe lectures with the vigor of youth, animating his witty insights with eyes popping, a tongue darting across his lips, broad smiles, and dramatic hand gesticulations, especially when he comes upon one of his "aha" findings, to wit, some insight or story that explains Everything...
...When the left-leaning New York Times Book Review announced on its that a survey of litt&ateurs had chosen the finest novel of the past 25 years, close students of that tribe knew before opening the magazine that the award had gone to Toni Morrison...
...In Washington, he spoke for over an hour without notes...
...He has earned the J. Gordon Coogler Award for the Worst Book of 2005...
...Jimmy published a book...
...He adjusted his appeal to the dominant forces in the Democratic Party of the 1970s...
...The constituent elements of status are of course matters a fine novelist will note in writing almost any novel worth reading...
...That is to say, his view of economics fit somewhere in between the views of the early Pranklin Roosevelt and those of the late Herbert Hoover...
...Carter began his political career welcoming the support of the Ku Klux Klan...
...It chronicles the revelries of campus life as witnessed by Wolfe, and it reads as though he spent a great deal of his research time at Duke University, observing the high-spirited Duke lacrosse team whose members have mired themselves in such controversy owing to their interest in modern dance...
Vol. 39 • July 2006 • No. 6
