Back on this last post, I made reference to something Tom Wolfe had written, and I just had to run it down, and it turns out to have been from The Right Stuff, and most delightfully of all, it was making fun of my least favorite sector of the MSM:
In the picture on the screen all you could see was the one TV woman, with the microphone in her hand, standing all by herself in front of Annie’s house. The curtains were pulled, somewhat unaccountably, inasmuch as it was nine o’clock in the morning, but it all looked very cozy. In point of fact, the lawn, or what was left of it, looked like Nut City. There were three or four mobile units from the television networks with cables running through the grass. It looked as if Arlington had been invaded by giant toasters. The television people, with all their gaffers and go-fers and groupies and cameramen and couriers and technicians and electricians, were blazing with 200-watt eyeballs and ricocheting off each other and the assembled rabble of reporters, radio stringers, tourists, lollygaggers, policemen, and freelance gawkers. They were all craning and writhing and rolling their eyes and gesturing and jabbering away with the excitement of the event. A public execution wouldn’t have drawn a crazier mob. It was the kind of crowd that would have made the Fool Killer lower his club and shake his head and walk away, frustrated by the magnitude of the opportunity…
Mind you, this was long before the 24/7 cable "news" channels took this sort of foolishness to exponentially greater lengths…
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NRO’s Uncommon Knowledge has a five-part interview with Tom Wolfe this week. Here’s part one and Here’s part five. Using those two links you should be able to get to all of The Word According to Tom Wolfe.
Wolfe is always ahead of his time.
He wrote “Bonfires” 2 or 3 years ahead of the Twana Brawley (SP) affair yet most people think he was writing after the fact.
He is the best…