A World of Ideas; 150; Tom Wolfe Part 2 of 2

BILL MOYERS' WORLD OF IDEAS January 26,1988, #150 Tom Wolfe -Part II

BILL

BILL MOYERS: [on camera] Good evening. I'm Bill Moyers. It's the nature of journalism to occupy itself with the bad news in life, the fires and the traffic jams, the depressions and the wars. It's the nature of some journalists to tum a sharp eye and a biting pen on the follies and vanities of everyday life. It's all the more surprising, then, to hear one of those acidic journalists tell us there's never been a greater moment to be alive or a greater country to be alive in. Join me for a conversation with Tom Wolfe.

[voice-over] Tom Wolfe dresses like a dandy from the 19th century, but his beat is the popular culture of the 20th, the follies of modern times. With The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamlined Baby, his first collection of essays, Wolfe in the 1960s helped to invent a new journalism. It snapped, crackled, and popped with exclamation marks, word pictures and dialogue that bounced and cavorted like some of the exotic characters Wolfe found growing in liberated America

Other books followed. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which took on the shenanigans of Ken Kesey and his merry pranksters and their romance with psychedelic drugs. Radical Chic, with its unforgettable portrait of piety on Park Avenue, The Right Stuff, and why America's space-age lest pilots had it. For a year now, Tom Wolfe's novel, Bonfire of the Vanities, has been on the best-seller list, carrying readers into the depraved, amoral and absurd life of New York City in the age of acquisition. Wolfe has eyes like blotters, soaking up what others look at but do not see, and like the 19thcentury novelists who are his literary heroes, he is rust and foremost a reporter of the life around him. We talked at his townhouse on the East Side of Manhattan.

[interviewing] Many of us through the last 25 years haven't known what we were seeing until you told us what we had seen. But you were right. You caught radical-chic on the fly in the sixties, the Me Decade was right on for the seventies. The eighties have been the Purple Decade, in the sense of the royal pursuit of ambition. What are you seeing now makes you think you can give a name and time to the nineties? TOM

TOM WOLFE: Well, I'm beginning to see a lot of different trends that were so spectacular in the sixties and seventies beginning to run into a stone wall. Just to use the most obvious example, pornography. Which became an everyday business in the seventies. The court decision that enabled pornography to be widespread and absolutely legal came in 1968. It was in the seventies that you began going to towns of about 200,000 and finding about 14 theatres of which about 11 were showing so-called X -rated, or pornographic, movies. And of those, there'd be two that would be outdoor drive-ins with these screens seven, eight, nine stories high, you know, the better to beam all these moistened folds and stiffened giblets to the countryside.

This has actually been a tremendous change in a country like this. This is a very religious country, or it has been. It's a very rapid and remarkable change in the country. And now it's run into something I don't have to elaborate on. It's run into AIDS. And this is in effect a stone wall that stops a very wild trend.

BILL MOYERS: You said in this regard, hitting a dead end, that the 21st century may well become known as the 20th century's hangover. In what sense?

TOM WOLFE: Well, let me put it this way. This has been an extraordinarily free century, particularly in the United States. Free not only in the conventional sense of political freedom, but also free in the economic sense of practically everyone who works having surplus income with which to express one's self, to live a life of some kind of slack in the line, some kind of luxury, if you will, some kind of real recreation. It has also been extremely free in the sense that people are not bound by the most ordinary religious standards, or things that were ordinary for centuries, if not millennia.

BILL MOYERS: Every person an aristocrat, as you said? Every person his own law? His own fashion?

TOM WOLFE: Well, it's every person an aristocrat in that you now find what we used to think of as the ordinary people taking on the privileges that in the past only aristocrats could help themselves to. For example, divorces. This idea of being able to help yourself to new mates, new lovers, whatever you want to call them, has always been the aristocrats' prerogative. Henry VIII's prerogative. Now if you go down to Puerto Vallarta, or Sl. Kitts, or Barbados, you'll run into factory workers, electricians, people we used to think of as working-class -to use another term that's disappeared -down there with their third wives, or their new girlfriend, wearing their Harry Belafonte can cutter shirts to allow the gold chains to twinkle in their chest hair, living a rather really luxurious life. Now this is two sides of the same coin. And one side, which is quite glorious, is prosperity and almost absolute freedom.

BILL MOYERS: The other side?

TOM WOLFE: The other side is all the hazards of freedom in sexual activity. Divorce is one of them, which does have its penalties, does have its effect on children. Now this is a11-I think that the down side is beginning to become clear. And so we're entering into this period that I think of as a period of relearning, in which we're busily relearning things that everybody knew 75 years ago.

BILL MOYERS: Namely?

TOM WOLFE: Well, such as the fact that promiscuity has its price. But this is also, I think, something of a worldwide phenomenon. In Europe-we've been blessed in a way. We haven't gone through any political upheavals in this country. This is a very stable country politically, very stable. Richard Nixon thrown out of office, forced out Not only was there no junta rising from the military to take over the situation, there wasn't even one demonstration by Republicans or anybody else. In fact, as far as I know, there wasn't even a drunk Republican who threw a brick through a saloon window.

BILL MOYERS: Republicans don't drink and they don't throw bricks.

TOM WOLFE: Instead, everybody sat back and they watched it on television. They said, "Look, he's crying now. Isn't that fascinating? He's crying now. He's leaving the White House now." I mean, this is a stable, this is a really stable country. But in Europe they've gone through communism-that's an impolite term now, incidentally, you're supposed to say Marxism, Leninism, or monolithic socialism-but they've been through communism. And the thing that

was so radical about communism was not that it swept aside the old order. All revolutions do that It was the fact that it reinvented morality, as in the Maoist expression, "Morality begins at

the point of a gun."

BILL MOYERS: Are we relearning morality? We're certainly learning, as you said, that promiscuity has its price. What else has its price, and what are we learning from it as a result?

TOM WOLFE: We're relearning the nature of debt. I never will forget in the 1970s, people started

telling me, "You've gotta leverage yourself." And I said, "What do you mean?" "You gotta get into debt. You got to get into debt up to here." I said, "Why?" They said, "Because debt is the lever that moves the world." And there was some strange logic to it that worked.

BILL MOYERS: Did you get leveraged?

TOM WOLFE: Oh, I got leveraged out of my mind. I never will forget one night I was in Texas, I was at dinner with some strangers, and I was sitting next to a man I never met in my life. And he says to me, "Son-" I thanked him for the compliment. "Son," he said, "I went down to the bank today and I borrowed $1.8 million." He said, "It wasn't for my company, it was a personal loan. No security, unsecured loan, $1.8 million." And I found myself in all sincerity clapping almost, "That's great. That's terrific. $1.8-" If he had told me that he had made $1.8 million that day, I would have probably yawned, because you're always hearing about people-But, golly, he could leverage himself in one day, $1.8 million-

BILL MOYERS: Let that be a lesson to you, never go to dinner in Texas with strangers unless you're prepared to borrow money from them.

TOM WOLFE: I may be prepared. Now that's---I think that since a year ago, since October 19, 1987, there's been more and more talk about the virtue of liquidity, which means having cash, which means not being in debt. Now, this is a form of relearning on what is oddly enough an ethical level. It used to be considered unethical to be deeply in debt It was considered to be showing a lack of discipline.

BILL MOYERS: The Bible, where I grew up, preached against it. Not that it had any impact in Texas, but the Bible preached against usury, against-

TOM WOLFE: Here's another thing that's now like a foreign notion. The seven deadly sins are all sins against the self. And this is an idea that's vanished pretty much. Lust, for example. The reason that lust in Christian religion was -particularly in the form of Catholicism that originated the seven deadly sins -was considered a sin was not that some man would be leading some nice girl from Akron into white slavery, or the pages of the pornographic magazines, but that he would be hurting himself by wasting his spirit on this shallow and pointless, base passion. And the same with anger, which is one of the seven deadly sins. It is not that your anger might hurt someone that it's directed against, the idea was that getting angry hurts you. Again, it's a waste of your spirit.

That idea has vanished. And today one of the typical forms of absolution is to say, "Well, it's not hurting anybody but me." You know. "Why do you object? It's not hurting anybody but me." It's hard to believe that 100 years ago, people didn't say things, didn't say things like that. You know, we've actually gone pretty far into this program without mentioning De Tocqueville. It's very hard to talk about-

BILL MOYERS: I'm sure we would have gotten to it, we have in all the other fifty.

TOM WOLFE: But I think it was 1835, de Tocqueville said the only way that the United States can afford the extraordinary political and personal freedom that people have is the fact that the American people are so intensely religious. And at that time we certainly were a religious people. It was very hard to rise to the level of assistant feed-store manager in a Midwestern town without belonging to the dominant Protestant church of that community. And there was this internal monitor, in the Calvinist sense, in people throughout this country; if you can believe the history that we read. And that is what tends to, it doesn't disappear, but it slackens if there isn't this internal monitor. Now, I'm sounding like a theologian. I'm just a social secretary. I just take notes on what I see going on. I have no agenda. I have no spiritual agenda for anyone, but this is what I see.

BILL MOYERS: But you did say in your Harvard Class Day speech recently that we're celebrating the age of freedom from religion. The implication of that, I seem to perceive, is there ought to be restoration of the ethical framework which grows out of religious roots?

TOM WOLFE: Well, if you've had every form of freedom that has been known before, been known to man, and then some, the only freedom, the only freedom that is left is freedom from the internal monitor, is freedom from religion. It has been an experiment that perhaps at some point man had to make. Ken Kesey, whom I wrote about in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, once said, in effect, "No one can be godlike without trying." Which was an interesting idea.

BILL MOYERS: Do you think that's what we've done in this century?

TOM WOLFE: I think just as-that has been son of the idea of being the ultimate master of your own fate. I mean, for most of the history of man, nobody would dare assume that you could be master of your own fate. That's what that whole concept of God was about. But as Nietzsche pointed out, God died about 100 years ago. And then people began to see just how far the mastery of the world could go. And you know, it's been a marvelous experiment in this country, and one that I have greatly enjoyed writing about. But when you take a headlong leap into the unknown, and a lot of it has been that, you can crash, and you can also find great heights. And I think we've done both. So I'm-you know, what I worry about is you get into this area, and people think that you're painting a gloomy picture and that there's hell to pay. And I don't believe that. I don't think in this-There has never been, I think, a greater moment to be alive and a greater country to be alive in.

BILL MOYERS: But don't you think that the religious restraints were thrown off in part because people learned there wasn't hell to pay? That hell disappeared?

TOM WOLFE: I think you're right. It seemed to -at least it certainly seemed to.

BILL MOYERS: And yet you've been suggesting that there's a different kind of hell to pay, which we're reaching at the limits of our permissive, autonomous, self-exploratory dive.

TOM WOLFE: Well, then, there may be in certain areas. AIDS is pretty forbidding stuff. It could occur in the economic area, but it hasn't yet. We've now been through a forty-I'd say a forty-five year boom. I think the boom that we're in right now, the economic boom, started about 1943, in the middle of the Second World War. And it hasn't stopped. Now it took a terrific jolt on October 19, 1987, but the other shoe has never dropped, and it may never. It may never drop.

BILL MOYERS: But something is happening to the old∑ idea that you and I, when you and I were growing up, was certainly the notion at the heart of the dream, which was that we were moving toward a more equitable distribution of goods. Now that's happened to most of us, but at the same time it's happened for the majority, it hasn't been happening for an increasing underclass as you yourself have written about. Do you think that notion is finished?

TOM WOLFE: No, I think it has happened for an awfully large majority. I think money in the last 4 years -affluence, if you will -has come down to most parts of the working population of the country on a scale that would have made the Sun King blink. I mean, it is extraordinary to see it started in California, working people, factory workers, buying first a car, and then a home, and then maybe a second car, and then maybe having a weekend place.

I was amused -I don't know why I was amused -but when one of the surveys was take after the Republican National Convention to see how the voters were going to go with Dukakis or Bush, they decided to have the respondents identify themselves by social class. And 85 per cent said they were middle class. And I was only sorry that the news item I read didn't tell how the other 15 percent characterized themselves.

BILL MOYERS: What do you make of that?

TOM WOLFE: It's a sign of wealth. I mean, it's a sign that the term working class can't be used in this country, because working class indicates that somebody is a slave to a job and is defined by a job. That just isn't true in this country any longer. I've talked to one of the heads of one of the, big advertising agencies recently, and he told me that it's driving the advertisers crazy, that these large blocks that they used to be able to pitch ads to that no longer exist. There isn't the factory worker, there isn't the housewife any longer. And to reach the factory worker, you may have to isolate his hobby. And his hobby may be anything from hang gliding to handcrafting of Venetian boats. And so there's this constant market segmentation, as they call it, to try to reach these little, these little special interests. Because here are people who have the free time and the money to cater to very esoteric, aesthetic interests.

In so many ways we are now alive in the period that the Utopian Socialists of the 19th century dreamed about People like Fourier, and SI. Simone, and Owen. They foresaw that industrialism would give the worker the free time and the personal freedom and the political freedom and the surplus money to express himself, and to somehow live up to his potential as a human being. They thought it was going to take place under socialism, and it didn't It took place here. Under what is now called capitalism.

BILL MOYERS: I recently did for this series an interview with Noam Chomsky. And he repeated what he and Herben Marcuse were espousing in the sixties, that this has, as Tom Wolfe says, been the freest period ever in any society; that Americans are more free than any other people. But that in a political sense this freedom is meaningless -no matter how much personal prosperity it brings them, as you've just said -it's meaningless politically because a corporate structure, private and public power, so dominates the landscape that it dictates the options from which people can choose and those options are not really that much contrasting. And therefore the personal freedom can be spent on trivial things, but is lost on political things. What do you think about that?

TOM WOLFE: Well, in short, I think it's absolute rubbish. Marcuse invented the marvelous term "repressive tolerance." And this is what is known as adjectival repression. And his idea was: these people are so free it's an instrument that the masters use to repress them. And so it's adjectival fascism. In this country there's always adjectival fascism; usually concocted by writers and thinkers. I think what happened to Marcuse, was here's a guy from Europe, he ends up in La Jolla, California -that's where he did his deep thinking -he walked along the beach, he comes to Wind and Sea Beach. And here were these fabulous-looking young men and women, and they're bursting with vitality and power. They look like the people that Marcuse as a young man saw on the strike posters in Europe, the proletarian breaking the--Prometheus breaking the bonds of capitalism. And he looked at them as the young rebels. Instead they were surfing. And he said, "They're free, they're strong, the masters have ruined them, they wanted to go surfing and smoke a little dope." He says it's a repressive time. That's absolutely rubbish. This is the old cabal theory that somewhere there's a room with a beige-covered desk, and there are a bunch of capitalists sitting around, and they're pulling strings. These rooms don't exist. I mean, I hate to tell Noam Chomsky this.

BILL MOYERS: You don't share that-

TOM WOLFE: I think it is the most absolute rubbish I've ever heard. This is the current fashion in the universities. I mean, a lot of it is at-you find it at places like Harvard and others; the notion that the masters -and this is a term you'll hear, the masters. It's another term for the establishment, the cabal, which is never located, incidentally, but that's the term -controls us not through military power, police power, and the obvious means, but by controlling the way we think. Frankly, I can't remember a period in which politics were more removed from corporate influence. Corporations are pussycats right now in the political arena, they're terrified.

BILL MOYERS: They give equally to both parties.

TOM WOLFE: Yes. I mean, they-

BILL MOYERS: Protecting their bet.

TOM WOLFE: When's the last time you heard an American capitalist -another rather antique phrase, to tell the truth -make a political statement? Now, they would answer that with, "Of course they don't make a statement, they control the way we think." It's patent nonsense, and I think it's nothing but a fashion. It's a way that intellectuals have of feeling like a clergy. I mean, there has to be something wrong.

BILL MOYERS: One of the things I sec wrong is that we don't have two parties, that we have two factions of the business party, and that it is wealth and power and privilege that both parties serve, although they may strike a different posture with their rhetoric in the course of a campaign.

TOM WOLFE: I'd love for them to give an example. I don't think they can. You'll notice how abstract these people become when they get into this area. Because you know, it's simply not true. I mean, does anyone think that Kennedy won under such circumstances? They obviously do, they obviously do think that, but I think to prove that point you'd have to hire the whole team of medieval Rosselinos and all the medieval scholastics to find the angels dancing on the head of the pin. I mean, it's rubbish.

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] From his home in Manhattan, this has been a conversation with Tom Wolfe. I'm Bill Moyers.