An oxymoron of one's own

Red states vs. blue states are of no concern to Tiny. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple or something in between, when it comes to superballs, it's not the color but the bounce.

"They literally do not set foot in the United States. We live in New York in one of the two parenthesis states," Tom Wolfe tells the WSJ's Joseph Rago re the sad state of the blue-state-bubble community.  Rago's profoundly shallow [Look, Ma, we've coined our own oxymoron!] interview of the great All-American writer betrays the interviewer himself as one of those who inhabit the periphery of civilization in these United States:

You can't "make all the relationships" as a writer, as Mr. Wolfe has it, unless you've got a theory. The conceptual rigging for his own work is the notion of status -- as he neatly defines it, the standing of "the human beast" as compared with the other beasts [We would have to disagree with Mr. Wolfe re the other beasts . . . Think peacocks and bauer birds for starters.] combined with our overriding awareness of the cues that mark hierarchy. "I think every living moment of a human being's life, unless the person is starving or in immediate danger of death in some other way, is controlled by a concern for status," he says.

Exactly what we are forever flogging here, Dr. Peter F. Rowbotham's theory of "the importance of being noticed." It makes sense of everything, from why astronauts launch themselves up to why suicide bombers blow themselves up. But the WSJ interviewer, apparently without a "conceptual rigging" of his own, can't make hide nor hair of it:

Mr. Wolfe has a habit of using experience and anecdote to gird an argument or shade a meaning, and he carries on like this for some time. Then, abruptly: "I really love this country. I just marvel at how good it is, and obviously it's the simple principle of freedom . . . Intellectually this is the system where people tend to experiment more and their experiments are indulged. Whatever we're doing I think we've done it extremely, extremely, extremely well." Silence. "These are terrible things to be saying if you want to have any standing in the intellectual world."

We guess it depends upon what your definition of "the intellectual world" is. The groupthink of the Whitney Biennial artists and their critical fellow travelers -- reduced by their ignorance into regurgitating regurgitations -- come to mind.

Update:  Red state and blue state call a truce at Modulator's 77th Friday Ark.

Comments

[goomp]

Unfortunately those who claim to be the intellectual world are mostly Intellectual Morons. Thankfully we still have the unrecognised intellectuals such as Tom Wolfe.

[gumshoe]

most "intellectuals"
(gotta love sneer quotes,eh?)
are self-described.

here's one description i've always enjoyed:

intellectual - Def.:
someone who has been educated beyond
his or her competence.

[Rorschach]

Personally prefer Bill Cosby's definition:

"Intellectuals go to school to STUDY things that other people just do natural."