PARTISAN
REVIEW
still feels he needs more "sense of
ethical alternative." And
New York
Review of Books,
slamming "Rad–
ical Chic," gets into a terrific sweat
over the noble motives of the Bern–
steins and their guests, the dignity
of the Panthers, and the nastiness
of Tom Wolfe, who is a voyeur,
and makes fun of people's Jewish
accents, and is no better than
Spiro Agnew, and should have
signed a check like a deoent human
being instead of insulting his host–
ess by writing such a mean story!
I hope Wolfe enjoyed that re–
view. It should have felt like dig–
ging a hole and having real hef–
falumps fall in. But even benign
reviewers mostly make sure to dis–
play their own Serious Concern
about the issues of poverty and
racism. In brief, everybody still
wants to bark up the tree of Good
and Evil- and so the message is
missed.
What message? William Blake
needled humanitarianism in eigh–
teenth-eentury England,
"Pity
would be no more
I
If
we did not
make somebody poor,1 And Mer–
cy no more could be,1
If
all were
as happy as we." In the August
1971
issue of
Social Policy,
M.LT.
sociologist Herbert Gans outlines a
theory of the social functions of
poverty. Poor people, he observes,
do useful things for others. They
create automatic status and self–
respect for the non-poor. They
offer votes to liberal politicians and
a handy scapegoat for conserva-
357
tives. More interestingly, they pro–
vide work for armies of penologists,
criminologists, social workers, pub–
lic health officials, OEO parapro–
fessionals and so on - all those
people who are supposed to be
"helping" the poor and who would
lose their reason for existence if the
poor were ever actually helped–
and of course they provide an ob–
ject for the benevolence of the
wealthy, a sacred cause for radical
intellectuals and a lifejuice culture
exploitable by the arts. What would
we do without them?
This dovetails nicely into
Radical
Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak
Catchers,
which suggests, similarly,
that good intentions, high motiva–
tions and serious concern about
social evils and "ethical alterna–
tives" - whether we are chic like
the Bernstein g;ang or nonchic like
the lowly flak catchers - are a
charming form of self-delusion. We
are pleased to suppose that the pol–
itical process of the nation is an
important matter. Wolfe thinks it's
a joke. The present book should
probably be read alongside his
earlier work, the LSD epic of Ken
Kesey and the Merry Pranksters
called
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid
Test
(which is not only the best
thing available on the countercul–
ture, but maybe the most exciting
treatment of the American Dream
since
The Great Gatsby).
Stylist–
ically,
The Acid Test
is every kind
of amazing indescribable. But here
the author is not merely bored or
