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"Power to the people!" says
Leon Quat . . . and all rise to
their feet . . . and Charlotte
Curtis puts the finishing touches
in her notebook . . . and the
white servants wait patiently in
the wings to wipe the drink rings
off the Amboina tables.
So much for dialogue. As a piece
of writing, "Radical Chic" isn't
Wolfe's best. In fact it reads a lit–
tle like stretched bubble gum
(though to my palate Wolfe bubble
gum is tastier than most writers'
steak and potatoes - in fact, a
hack job, like, stretch it out for
that deadline and the dodos will
never know the difference. I at–
tribute this, actually, to authorial
boredom. The Beautiful People are
not going to teach
Wolle
anything
about style. And alas, the rhetoric–
laden Panthers, though they do suc–
ceed in hooking a corner of his
admiration, are not going to teach
him anything about revolution.
More on this below.
The companion essay, "Mau–
Mauing the Flak Catchers," de–
scribes a less exalted form of mutual
hustle. When the Office of Eco–
nomic Opportunity wanted to give
money to ghetto leaders in 1968,
how could they find the true lead–
ers? Well, says a San Francisco
character named Chaser, getting
his boys set for a bureaucratic
meeting,
Y'all wear your
ghetto rags.
...
You wear your
combat
fatigues
and your leather
pieces
and your
shades.... You go down with
your hair
stickin' out
. . .
and
ALICIA OSTRIKER
sittin' uP!
Lookin' wild! I want
to see you down there looking
like a bunch of
wild niggers!
...
He'll try to get you to agree
with him. He'll say "Ain't that
right?" and "You know what I
mean?" and he wants you to
say yes or nod your head ...
see. . . . It's part of his psy–
chological jiveass. But you don't
say nothing. You just glare ...
Then some of the other brothers
will get up on that stage behind
him, like there's no more room
or like they just gathering
around. Then you brothers up
there behind him, you start let–
ting him have it.... He starts
thinking, "Oh, good God! Those
bad cats are in front of me, they
all
around
me, they
behind
me.
I'm
surrounded."
That shakes
'em up.
Mau-mauing was a ghetto term
for what the press called "con–
frontation"; flak catchers, the Hush
Puppy civil service functionaries
begging for symbolic castration so
they could know who the real
bad
boys were and could ladle the
funds out to them. Wolfe estimates
hundreds of militant confrontations
in San Francisco, thousands in the
nation. He runs through a few of
these, and incidentally performs a
stunning analysis of the poverty–
money scene in these innocent
States.
In response to these fleeting joys,
one reviewer after another finds
Wolfe insufficiently committed to
justice and humanity. Why, asks
the
Times
anxiously, doesn't he
suggest what to do about racism?
New Republic
sort of approves, but
