xtcian

Those last two links especially disturb me.

How would that crowd feel if we wanted to pass laws requiring, say, that anyone wanting to join a church would have to sign a paper indicating they'd been told that too much religious practice might cause mental illness, especially delusions?

I idly considered writing an essay entitled "Why I'm leaving the South, or; it's not the heat, it's the STUPIDITY."

But of course, the South, per se, is not the problem; it's that 51% of US 'Murkuns again, and they're everywhere. Actually, it's the faith-based-reality crowd that are the real problem, and they're a small fraction of the 51%.

Faith is a wonderful thing of course; faith can move mountains--but do you have to put that mountain right on top of people's rights?

Ian, maybe it was the "two Glenfiddich "Zingers" and two Cape Cods" but I wasn't sure what you were saying in your last paragraph. (Or maybe it was the spam phone call at 4 a.m. this morning that has left ME addled).

The two links in your last bit were horrifying, and I assume that when you say "I'm starting to see their point," you are talking about the "New York intelletuals" and not the people who give the disturbing and false information to women seeking abortions. But... well, obviously.. but...

Your writing is usually so crystal clear (if at times a little hyperboic, a trait you inherited, alas, from me). Which brings me to another small point. When I read your "American Coastopia" posts, it was perfectly clear to me that you were indulging in humorous hyperbole, however close to your real feelings it might have been. Writers do that. Hell, read Mencken. He wasn't kidding either, but he was... well... kidding. His iconoclastic statements were never a bugle calling real troops into the fray. He was even, by all accounts, a lot grumpier than you are.

Kent makes some good points, which I agree on:
(http://www.livejournal.com/users/chaircrusher/
Always the gentle soul, he is inclined to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. But of course you didn't mean to ACTUALLY organize secession. It was, clearly, a hyperbolic and endearing nod to those of us who plan to spend the next four years turning off the TV when Bush's simian face appears to spout something like his recent "I've earned political capital, and I plan to spend it."

Coastopians everywhere will shudder through the next four years of Bush's arrogance, delusion, and ignorance, and hope and pray that the fundamentalists, the frightened moms, the over-testosteroned, et al. finally realize what a ninny they have elected and do better next time.

End of rant.

Mom

Would Mom prefer to run for the senate or house in 2 years? What state do we think she'd run best in? Should we start with a high-profile state job (maybe Lt. Gov) or jump straight to the Washington-based jobs? We've really got to get started soon if she's going to seriously challenge Obama in 2012 for the White House...

Check this out:

http://www.fuckthesouth.com

Wow. Just read the link David Ball posted. I need to wash my mind out with soap. Although I do admit, I wish I could rant so, er, succinctly.

So, here's my biggest fear: Bush is going to start f*ing with the US Constitution. He just started with the gay marriage ban, and now he wants a presidential veto - and is willing to use the damn Republican majority to vote to amend the Constitution to get it. Does he think that Jefferson and Washington and Hamilton and the like didn't THINK about that back in the day? Does he think that these "gay folks" just started being gay in the 1990's??? Hello?! They wore WIGS and PANTYHOSE back then, for Christ sake. Gah.

Seriously, he has no respect for the great work our founding fathers did to provide one of the most enduring foundations for a succesful democracy the world has ever known. And you can't tell me that he doesn't have his sights also on reversing Roe v. Wade. My God, four years cannot pass fast enough.

I'm just about ready to go to damn Washington damn D.C. myself with some damn vitamins and saline packs for the Supreme Court justices. And in the back of my mind, I would not be surprised if Bush is lacing some Supreme Court Cheerios with arsenic, just to move things along for him.

jackass.

(p.s. For the record, I know how hard it is to amend the Constitution, and that it won't just take a Republican majority vote to do it, how states need to ratify, blah, blah, blah - so please, no lectures on the process...OLIVER.) ;)

What are these people doing choosing to be pharmacists in the first place? It makes about as much sense as a Christian scientist becoming a pharmacist and refusing to fill any prescriptions at all.

I'm all for states' rights. Let these cultural Chernobyls pass whatever restrictive laws they want, bring back Jim Crow, institutionalize sexism and abolish laws against incest so they can live by their true colors. Any real Americans who don't want to be their victims can move to coastopian states and increase our populations, Congressional delegations, and electoral votes at the expense of the 19th Century states.

Um, I wouldn't be so quick to have my mom run for a senate seat. It takes her most of every day just to figure out what city she's in. She actually went to the store this weekend for eggs and forgot the eggs. If morals really were people's number one concern, she'd be a great candidate, but you don't really want your candidate, on national TV, looking around for her glasses when they are on her head.

Sean, nothing you said about your mom couldn't be said about our current president, except for maybe the morals thing...

Mr. "Southern Born",

re your

"If you think I'm an asshole, you should hear what real New York intellectuals think of you......"

Oh really, "O'Faulkner" in basic training? Compared to this guy you have the intelligence and talent of a garden slug. Read on McDuff:

'The liberal elite hasn't got a clue'

As a member of the Manhattan intelligentsia, novelist Tom Wolfe seems a lonely defender of George Bush's conservative values. But, he tells Ed Vulliamy, he's bewildered by a sex-mad society and tired of being lectured to at dinner parties. So is he voting for Dubya tomorrow? He's not quite telling

Monday November 1, 2004

Tom Wolfe casts his gaze across America at this election time, with eyes that change mood in a nanosecond, with a flicker. For the most part, they exude an amused elegance befitting the hallmark white suit and dandy-ish two-tone brogues. But then the look suddenly changes, to become scalpel-sharp, mischievous, seizing upon some detail. It is a metamorphosis which begins to explain, perhaps, how this softly-spoken, immaculately-mannered gentleman journalist from the South can write with such voracity about the grime and sediment which inhabits American society and the human soul.

Certainly the view is stirring from the place to which he retreats to write, and where we meet: his outrageously beautiful Manhattan apartment taking up the 14th floor of a block on the Upper East Side, with sweeping views over a Central Park drenched in autumnal sunshine. A grand piano sits in the corner, painted in what Wolfe calls "cocktail lounge navy blue". Shelves are stacked with books on 19th-century, modern and Dutch art. In what he calls his office, next to the sitting room, is a huge, handsome and ornate bureau on which sits handwriting instruments and two panama hats.

From this desk, and the pen of arguably America's greatest current writer - author of the 1987 epic Bonfire of the Vanities and much more besides - there now comes a third major novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, to be published next week, on the other side of election day. Wolfe set out, for the first time, to write the book on a computer, but gave up in favour of his usual typewriter. "Then I jammed my finger badly," he says, "and took up pen and paper. This may turn out to be the last book ever written that way."

A new Tom Wolfe novel is always a literary event: where will he go next? The answer this time is an elite, imaginary Ivy League university, Dupont College, for a book about libido off the leash, and about the cult of what Wolfe calls "the bad comedy" of college sports - athletes taken on by centres of academic excellence for their bodies, not their brains.

The novel - researched, as usual, down to the last expletive - concerns a young world speaking "fuck patois", loaded with creatine and cocaine, numbed by PlayStation 3, and charged by alcohol, the "vile spleen" of rap and, above all, ubiquitous sex between the heirs and heiresses to privilege in America. Most intriguingly, in this week of all weeks in American history, the book affords a gateway towards explaining Wolfe's boldly delivered, tantalising, remark: "I have sympathy with what George Bush is trying to do, although obviously the excursion [into Iraq] is not going well."

Four years ago, Wolfe wrote an essay to mark the millennium called Hooking Up, about what he called "feverish emphasis on sex and sexiness". In a way, the new novel is a literary fruition of the essay. The excess and decadence at Dupont College are seen through the eyes of his heroine, Charlotte Simmons, who arrives a diligent virgin from the hills of North Carolina, on a full scholarship. She is initially intimidated and appalled, but eventually conquers her fear to partake, indeed to star, in the jock beanfeast.

"I personally would be shocked out of my pants if I was at college now," confides Wolfe, who spent four years trawling the campuses for raw material. The book, he says, is "about sex as it interacts with social status. And I have tried to make the sex un-erotic. I will have failed if anyone gets the least bit excited. So much of modern sex is un-erotic, if erotic means flight of fancy or romantic build-up. Sex now is so easy to consummate - it is a pressure that affects everybody, girls more than boys, I think."

As he notes, the America which votes tomorrow is a country riven over morality like never before. On the flip side of the culture of ubiquitous sex is that of puritan Christianity, as harnessed in no small part by Bush. "Yes, there is this puritanism," says Wolfe, "and I suppose we are talking here about what you might call the religious right. But I don't think these people are left or right, they are just religious, and if you are religious, you observe certain strictures on sexual activity - you are against the mainstream, morally speaking. And I do have sympathy with them, yes, though I am not religious. I am simply in awe of it all; the openness of sex. In the 60s they talked about a sexual revolution, but it has become a sexual carnival."

No writer has chronicled the full American curve over four decades quite like Wolfe. He has been at this, unswervingly, since 1965, when he published a curio about pop culture called The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. His breakthrough came in 1968 with The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, his chronicle of Ken Kesey's LSD-gobbling Merry Pranksters. "If I have been judged to be right wing," he says, "I think this is because of the things I have mocked. It started with Radical Chic [published in 1970, about a fundraising party for the Black Panthers organised by Leonard Bernstein]. I was denounced because people thought I had jeopardised all progressive causes. But my impulse was not political, it was simply the absurdity of the occasion. Then I wrote The Painted Word, about modern art, and was denounced as reactionary. In fact, it is just a history, although a rather loaded one. Then came The Right Stuff [his account of America's first astronauts], after which my relative enthusiasm for Nasa was another sign of perfidy."

He is "proud", he says, "that I do not think any political motivation can be detected in my long books. My idol is Emile Zola. He was a man of the left, so people expected of him a kind of Les Miserables, in which the underdogs are always noble people. But he went out, and found a lot of ambitious, drunk, slothful and mean people out there. Zola simply could not - and was not interested in - telling a lie. You can call it honesty, or you can call it ego, but there it is. There is no motivation higher than being a good writer."

In his manifesto of 1973 on The New Journalism, Wolfe advocated a "journalistic or perhaps documentary novel". He re-invoked the idea four years ago by way of retort to a fusillade of criticism - an exchange which scandalised New York society - levelled against his last novel, A Man In Full, from no less than Norman Mailer, John Updike and John Irving. The new book is in itself a counter to that outburst.

Wolfe's lambent success in documenting ambition, drunkenness, sloth and meanness in his own country has taken him from his native Virginia to New York which he wrote about in Bonfire of the Vanities, pitching the super-rich "Masters of the Universe" in high finance against the real world of the Bronx. But even as the author of the quintessential New York novel, Wolfe feels estranged in the city, as he surveys America during the final days of the election campaign. Estranged not from the subjects of his scrutiny, the "Masters of the Universe", but rather from the liberal elite.

"Here is an example of the situation in America," he says: "Tina Brown wrote in her column that she was at a dinner where a group of media heavyweights were discussing, during dessert, what they could do to stop Bush. Then a waiter announces that he is from the suburbs, and will vote for Bush. And ... Tina's reaction is: 'How can we persuade these people not to vote for Bush?' I draw the opposite lesson: that Tina and her circle in the media do not have a clue about the rest of the United States. You are considered twisted and retarded if you support Bush in this election. I have never come across a candidate who is so reviled. Reagan was sniggered it, but this is personal, real hatred.

"Indeed, I was at a similar dinner, listening to the same conversation, and said: 'If all else fails, you can vote for Bush.' People looked at me as if I had just said: 'Oh, I forgot to tell you, I am a child molester.' I would vote for Bush if for no other reason than to be at the airport waving off all the people who say they are going to London if he wins again. Someone has got to stay behind."

Where does it come from, this endorsement of the most conservative administration within living memory? Of this president who champions the right and the rich, who has taken America into the mire of war, and seeks re-election tomorrow? Wolfe's eyes resume the expression of detached Southern elegance.

"I think support for Bush is about not wanting to be led by East-coast pretensions. It is about not wanting to be led by people who are forever trying to force their twisted sense of morality onto us, which is a non-morality. That is constantly done, and there is real resentment. Support for Bush is about resentment in the so-called 'red states' - a confusing term to Guardian readers, I agree - which here means, literally, middle America. I come from one of those states myself, Virginia. It's the same resentment, indeed, as that against your own newspaper when it sent emails targeting individuals in an American county." Wolfe laughs as he chastises. "No one cares to have outsiders or foreigners butting into their affairs. I'm sure that even many of those Iraqis who were cheering the fall of Saddam now object to our being there. As I said, I do not think the excursion is going well."

And John Kerry? "He is a man no one should worry about, because he has no beliefs at all. He is not going to introduce some manic radical plan, because he is poll-driven, and it is therefore impossible to know where or for what he stands."

As far as Wolfe is concerned, "the great changes in America came with the second world war, since which time I have not seen much shift in what Americans fundamentally believe. Apart from the fact that as recently as the 1970s, Nelson Rockefeller shocked people by leaving his wife of 30 years, while now celebrities routinely have children outside marriage, the mayor of New York leaves his wife for his lover and no one blinks. But a large number of people have remained religious, and it is a divided country - do not forget that Al Gore nearly won the last election. The country is split right along party lines."

And there has been a complete climate change in the nation which elected Bill Clinton twice, to that which may confer the same honour on George Bush tomorrow. This, says Wolfe, began not with the election of Bush, but on the morning of September 11 2001.

None of us who were in New York that day will ever forget it, and Wolfe is no exception. "I was sitting in my office when someone called to tell me two light planes had collided with the World Trade Centre. I turned on my television, before long there was this procession of people of all kinds, walking up the street. What I remember most was the silence of that crowd; there was no sound.

"That day told us that here was a different kind of enemy. I honestly think that America and the Bush administration felt that something extreme had to be done. But I do not think that the Americans have become a warlike people; it is rare in American history to set about empire-building - acquiring territory and slaves. I've never met an American who wanted to build an empire. And while the invasion of Afghanistan was something that had to be done, I am stunned that Iraq was invaded."

Wolfe is by no means afraid to offend the political right - "I'm gratified if you find me to be hard on them too," he says. He also anticipates that "conservatives will not like this new novel because I refuse to take the impact of political correctness seriously - I think PC has probably had a good effect because it is now bad manners to use racial epithets."

So what is it about his liberal neighbours and fellow diners in his adoptive New York that Wolfe cannot abide? "I cannot stand the lock-step among everyone in my particular world. They all do the same thing, without variation. It gets so boring. There is something in me that particularly wants it registered that I am not one of them."

Parting cordially, it seems strange that such an effervescent maverick, such a jester at the court of all power - all vanity, indeed - should so wholeheartedly endorse the power machine behind George Bush. And so an obvious thought occurs: perhaps Wolfe is jester at the court of New York too. Would he really be happier away from New York, out on the plains, in the "red states" where everyone at dinner parties votes for Bush? Wolfe's eyes revert to that mischievous glint, and he allows himself a smile. "I do think," he admits, apparently speaking for himself, his country and his president, "that if you are not having a fight with somebody, then you are not sure whether you are alive when you wake up in the morning."

"Garden slug"? Wow, I GOT BURNED!!!

Holy fucking shit.

The terrible thing about liberals is "the lock-step among everyone"? "They all do the same thing without variation"?

What community of liberals is this guy living in, anyhow? And what's the one thing they do all the time without variation? In the NYC I remember, You could choose from any of a dozen fashions, cuisines, philosophies, concert halls, hobbies, social circles, cultural reference points, and values on any given day. If anything, the weak point was that there was too much mercurial variety, not conformity.

On the other hand, if you've seen one Southern Republican, you've seen them all.

Yah, that Wolfe guy's hella smart.

And a very typical Southerner. Gets a little rowdy when he's drunk, though. They had to throw him out of last Sunday's NASCAR race when he started throwing his empty Busch cans out onto the track. He was also picking fights with Jeff Gordon fans.

Or maybe that was Thomas Wolfe. I often get them confused.