Living A Tom Wolfe Novel Every Single Day Of My Life

After she pulled an Althouse, and backed Obama before Romney, I still don't understand why Gawker is one of the few outlets providing this kind of political coverage:

 

Breathy Reaganite Peggy Noonan has lived. She has stayed in a hotel, traveled to darkest Brooklyn, and even seen a Mexican.

Truly living a life of danger:

But thankfully, unlike Althouse, Peggy's never deigned to show "the other half" her travel photos,...

 

Tom Wolfe: "They Bring It Back To The Nazi Period,..."

Tommy Boy sees it, too - just as I've been saying all along:

Whatever I am, when it comes to this culture - this NewAge - I've never been far off,...

ADDED:

 Drudge catches Hollywood in the act,...

Everything They Hoped For (Just No Change)

"Two journalistic events of the 1970s defined the Age of Narcissism. First, the term 'Me Decade' was introduced by novelist Tom Wolfe in a New York magazine article in 1976. A few years later, Christopher Lasch’s book The Culture of Narcissism provided a more substantive commentary on the diminishing ability of modern society and culture to provide a sense of identity and security for its members.

Changes in cultural values, economic structures and personal relationships, according to Lasch, created a society unmoored from historical measures of status based in work, religion, achievement or lineage. As a result, Americans were caught up in a never-ending, never-fulfilling competition for the symbols of status. You’re unsure of your status, and in fact, it’s almost never clear in your neighborhood just who is the boss of who — or at least who is socially superior. So we’re free to fake each other out with houses, cars, clothes, friends, Facebook pages, cosmetic surgery and other 'big-ticket items' to satisfy our need to be special, and to matter in the scheme of things.

While Lasch saw our narcissistic culture as the result of having lost our historical bearings, Wolfe saw the opposite. The Me Decade, he wrote (an amazing, funny, eloquent article, if you’ve never read it), was a natural outgrowth of the embarrassment of material riches cranked out in the postwar industrial boom. Having satisfied all of our basic needs and many of our big-ticket fantasies for flashy things, a new generation of Americans decided to just bypass the symbols of happiness, going whole-hog instead for direct access to the real thing through some kind of personal enlightenment.

Gurus, spiritual movements, self-improvement programs such as est and Scientology, Transcendental Meditation, fringe therapies such as Primal Scream — Wolfe saw these as an expression of encroaching societal narcissism. Years after the New York magazine article, Wolfe expanded his critique of narcissistic American culture to include the young financial wizards of Wall Street, or 'Masters of the Universe' as he called them in the novel — and later the movie, Bonfire of the Vanities."

-- Russell Collins, a Santa Barbara psychotherapist and divorce mediator, on this NewAge we suffer through, with the Noozhawk.

The Only "Change" The Dems Need Is To End Their Fascination With The Beliefs Of The 70's

"It is entirely possible that in the long run historians will regard the entire New Left experience as not so much a political as a religious episode,...." [Underlined emphasis TMR's]

-- Tom Wolfe, who nailed the current Democratic Party's "spiritual" obsessions in his 1976 essay "The 'Me' Decade and the Third Great Awakening", for New York Magazine

Everyone should read Wolfe's essay - not just because it's a hysterical comedy of errors - but as a very informative "spiritual" romp through the worst American decade in the modern era, which was the moment of inspiration for the latest wave of NewAge believers, the current Democratic leadership's cultism, and even John Edwards's confession he was "narcissistic" (in love with himself) when he fell for the "enlightened" Rielle Hunter.

If, like me, you find the Left "out there," then it's all right here. Dive in - but be sure not to have eaten for, at least, an hour.

Hat Tip: Mystic Bourgeoisie - who wears a mighty big hat - and adds:

"If the final sentence above doesn't alarm you, you haven't been paying sufficient attention. For your penance, say six Hail Marys and six Our Fathers, commune with your Inner Light for five hours, sign up for A Course in Miracles at your local Unity Church (or New Thought church of your choice), watch seven episodes of Oprah co-teaching with Eckhart Tolle, register your kid in a Walden School -- then go back to the first post here and read through the entire Mystic B archives! If that last bit doesn't work, swear an oath of lifelong celibacy and stay out of the gene pool.”

Like I Said,...

"Tom Wolfe and America? He loves the place, a position that puts him at odds with much of the charming aristocracy. He’s also an optimist about America — and American greatness. 'The biggest problem,' says Wolfe, 'is all the people who see a problem.'"

-- The intro the National Review's "Uncommon Knowledge" interview of (the overly-dapper but extremely insightful) author Tom Wolfe.