The Inspector General's Report Will Expose the MSM as Treasonous

BY ROGER L SIMON
https://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/the-inspector-generals-report-will-expose-the-msm-as-treasonous/
May 18, 2018


Reporters Bob Woodward, right, and Carl Bernstein, helped break the Watergate scandal that brought down the presidency of Richard Nixon. (AP)

One of the more notable differences between Watergate and the metastasizing scandals involving the FBI, our intelligence agencies, and the Obama administration -- subjects of the soon-to-be-released inspector general's report -- is that the media exposed Watergate. They aided and abetted the current transgressions.

By providing a willing and virtually unquestioned repository for every anonymous leaker (as long as he or she was on the "right" side) in Washington and beyond, the press has evolved from being part of the solution to being a major part of the problem. Gone are the days of the true "whistle-blower." Here are the days of the special interest provocateur, shaping public opinion by passing on half-truths and outright lies to their favorite reporter. One might then even call the media, in Orwell's words, "objectively pro-fascist," functioning much in the manner of Pravda and Izvestia during that famous author's time, covertly or overtly pushing the party line in the most slavish and orthodox manner while feigning "objectivity."

CNN, NBC, the Washington Post and The New York Times -- misinforming the public as it hasn't since the days of their great Stalin-excuser Walter Duranty (still pictured on their Pulitzer wall of honor) -- are particularly egregious in this regard. But there are many others.

And the current scandal is far, far worse than Watergate, which, bad as it was, was the coverup of a completely unnecessary buffoon-like break-in during an election that was already won in a landslide. What is being exposed now is an attempt by our highest law enforcement agency working in concert with our intelligence agencies and, evidently, the blessing of the former administration itself to block the candidate of the opposing party, even to defraud and spy on him, that is to, as others have said, "set him up." And then, if they were unsuccessful, make it impossible for him to govern. In addition, in all probability, the same players conspired to make certain Hillary Clinton was not indicted for a crime for which virtually any other American would have done jail time.

Forget Donald Trump. Forget whoever is running. It could be your Aunt Fanny or William Buckley's random person from the Boston telephone directory. Forget whatever party we are talking about. This is the stuff of high treason of a type not imaginable to almost all of us in our lifetimes as American citizens. I and others have compared this plot to Lavrentiy Beria and the NKVD. At first, I admit, I was exaggerating a bit for effect. Now, not so much.

What we have here are people who think they are "good" driven to evil by their own self-righteousness.

So what will the mainstream media who participated so heavily in this, who were in effect the enabler of this disgraceful anti-democratic enterprise, do when the inspector general's report is finally published?

We may have gotten a taste in the nervous reaction of CNN's Jake Tapper to an informative series of tweets from the WSJ's Kimberley Strassel on the matter. Roughly a year ago, Mr. Tapper famously accused Donald Trump of himself being a purveyor of "fake news" for alleging he was being wiretapped (what an understatement that turned out to be!). Instead of apologizing for being wildly wrong or even acknowledging his mistake, Tapper tweaked Ms. Strassel for accidentally tweeting "Hurricane Crossfire" rather than "Crossfire Hurricane" (the name the FBI cribbed from Mick Jagger as a trendy name for their repellent activities).

Tapper is considered one of the more intelligent and putatively responsible of the MSM crew. If he is unable to face this coming press Armageddon, few will be. They bet the house that Donald Trump was the worst man in the room, but it turned out, and will be made quite explicit I would imagine, that there were many men and women far worse than he. It's not even close.

An interesting sidelight is the degree to which Watergate itself inspired the present level of reportorial corruption by launching "leaks" (i. e. Deep Throat and company) as the royal road to journalistic success, Pulitzer prizes, and Hollywood fame. In a sense, that would put journalism today in its Robespierre period, going further and further out onto a limb for a story until the limb falls off.

Whether Barack Obama himself will be looped definitively into the IG's report, we don't know at this time. But we all know where the fish rots from and we also know that Obama, despite his denials, knew well that Hilary was using an illegal server. He wrote her there himself under an assumed name, showing he was only slightly more computer savvy than John Podesta.

These next few weeks are going to be among the most interesting in our lifetimes -- especially for our friends in the press. We know from the NYT earlier this week they are preparing their excuses. Let's hope they don't have enough.

Author and screenwriter Roger L. Simon is co-founder and CEO Emeritus of PJ Media. His latest book is I Know Best:  How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic If It  Hasn't Already. He tweets @rogerlsimon.

Richard Pipes, authority on Russia and Soviet Union, and a Reagan-era hardliner, dies at 94

By Mark Feeney and Bryan Marquard
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/obituaries/2018/05/17/richard-pipes-authority-russia-and-soviet-union-and-reagan-era-hardliner-dies/lSovElkZUSJ5RYLvET4dRI/story.html
May 18, 2018


Richard Pipes, 1991 (Bill Greene/Boston Globe)

Richard Pipes, the Frank B. Baird Jr. research professor emeritus of history at Harvard University and one of the West’s foremost authorities on Russia and the Soviet Union, died Thursday in Belmont. He was 94.

Dr. Pipes was a participant in history as well as its student. He headed an outside group, which became known as Team B, brought in by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1976 to analyze Soviet strategic objectives. Its hard-line findings helped lay the foundation for Washington’s eventual abandonment of the policy of cooperation with the Soviets, known as detente, and the massive arms buildup of the Reagan years.

From 1981 to 1983, Dr. Pipes served as director of East European and Soviet Affairs for the National Security Council.

“I never made history, but I certainly played a part in historical events,” he said in a 1999 Globe interview. “It was a great experience, and I think I contributed something to destroying the Soviet regime.”

Dr. Pipes’s “The Russian Revolution” (1990) and “Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime” (1994) are widely considered the most comprehensive studies of the origins and early years of the communist assumption of power in 1917. A one-volume condensation, “A Concise History of the Russian Revolution,” was published in 1995. All three books have been widely translated.

The books on the revolution concluded a larger study that had begun with “Russia Under the Old Regime” (1974), which had emphasized the continuities between Russian and Soviet history. In all, Dr. Pipes was the author or editor of more than two dozen books, including a two-volume biography of the Russian reformer Peter Struve (1970 and 1980), “Survival Is Not Enough” (1984), “The Unknown Lenin” (1996), “Property and Freedom” (1999), and “Communism: A Brief History” (2001).

“Richard Pipes was one of the most prominent, versatile, prolific, and influential historians of Russia in the English-speaking world,” said Jonathan Daly, a professor of history at the University of Illinois Chicago. Daly is at work on an intellectual biography of Dr. Pipes.

Dr. Pipes liked to describe himself as a “conservative anarchist.” He explained why in that 1999 interview: “a conservative because I have great respect for tradition . . . an anarchist because I don’t like anyone telling me what to think.”

Scorning “revisionist” studies of the Soviet Union, with their comparatively benign interpretations of Soviet actions and aims, Dr. Pipes held a critical view of the communist regime. Indeed, the dedication of “The Russian Revolution” reads “To the victims.”

Dr. Pipes’s feelings were reciprocated. Quotations from him were banned in the Soviet press, where he was exclusively referred to as an “imperialist adept” or “antisovietchik.” When the Kremlin published a book called “Richard Pipes: Falsifier of History,” he kept a stack of copies in his office, which he would show off to visitors.

The collapse of the Soviet Union was something Dr. Pipes took great satisfaction in. “In September of ’91 I stood inside the building where the Central Committee had had its offices,” he once recalled. “A Russian standing next to me said, ‘Did you ever think this would happen?’ That was a thrilling moment.”

Dr. Pipes’s knowledge of Russia’s past made him prescient about its future.

“I was very hopeful in ’91, ’92, that they would take a more democratic course,” he said in 1999. “I don’t think there’s the slightest chance communism will come back . . . but it’s entirely possible that they’ll go to some kind of authoritarian regime — and that would be consistent with their traditions.”

Vladimir Putin was first elected in 2000.

Richard Edgar Pipes was born in Cieszyn, Poland, on July 11, 1923, the son of Mark Pipes and Sophia (Haskelberg) Pipes. Growing up in Warsaw, he was first taught German, then Polish. His initial interests were musical and artistic. As an adult, Dr. Pipes collected art, favoring prints by the renowned Japanese artist Hiroshige. One of his books was “Russia’s Itinerant Painters” (2011).

“By a combination of daring and good fortune,” as Dr. Pipes once put it, he and his parents escaped Warsaw a month after it fell to the Nazis. Guards at the Austrian-Italian border questioned the authenticity of the Pipes’s forged passports. After a long delay, the family was told they could proceed, on one condition: that they not return to German soil. “We said ‘OK,’ ” Dr. Pipes recalled in 1999, with a long, heartfelt laugh.

From Italy, Dr. Pipes and his parents went to Portugal, reaching the United States in the summer of 1940. “It was so stable,” he said in that Globe interview. “I remember reading an advertisement in Life magazine for some insurance company: ‘Unforeseen events should not affect the course of a man’s life.’ I remember thinking, ‘These people are living in the 19th century!’”

He attended Muskingum College in Ohio and Cornell University. After serving in the Army Air Force, he entered Harvard in 1946. He got his doctorate there in 1950, became a full professor in 1958, and retired in 1996. From 1968-1973, he was director of the university’s Russian Research Center.

Of the time Dr. Pipes spent in the nation’s capital, he said in 1999 that he didn’t “want to be controversial. I don’t want just to be attacked, but it happens that I very often am. I tremendously value my intellectual independence and being able to say what I want, which made life very difficult for me when I was in Washington.”

As a mentor, Dr. Pipes “gave his students great latitude, though he often suggested to them what he considered promising research topics,” said Daly, who was among his graduate students at Harvard.

“His analytical brilliance, broad learning, extraordinary productivity, and dedication to clear scholarly writing served as a model to all of us.”

Daly added that “there were tensions with some of his graduate students in the late 1960s and beyond, given Pipes’s anti-Soviet and anti-communist convictions. Yet even those of his PhD students who fell out with him over his politics universally acknowledged the great benefits they reaped from the scholarly journal ‘Kritika,’ which Dr. Pipes launched in 1964.”

A 2007 recipient of the National Humanities Medal, Dr. Pipes leaves his wife, Irene Eugenia (Roth) Pipes; two sons, Daniel of Philadelphia and Steven of New York; and four grandchildren.

A graveside service will be held Friday in Beth Israel Memorial Park, in Waltham.

In 2003, Dr. Pipes published an autobiography, “Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger.”

“There are various reasons for writing an autobiography, but for me the most important is to get to know oneself,” he wrote.

“For if one has lived to a ripe old age, as I have, one’s life is a long story whose earlier chapters are clouded in darkness,” he added. “Are we the same over these decades? Can we still understand what we have once said and done, and why? To write an autobiography is akin to doing an archeological dig, with the difference being that the digger is also the site.”

Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com. Bryan Marquard can be reached atbryan.marquard@globe.com.

Richard Pipes, Historian of Russia and Reagan Aide, Dies at 94

By William Grimes
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/17/obituaries/richard-pipes-historian-of-russia-and-reagan-aide-dies-at-94.html
May 17, 2018



Richard Pipes, the author of a monumental, sharply polemical series of historical works on Russia, the Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik regime, and a top adviser to the Reagan administration on Soviet and Eastern European policy, died on Thursday at a nursing home near his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 94.

His son Daniel confirmed the death.

Professor Pipes, who spent his entire academic career at Harvard, took his place in the front rank of Russian historians with the publication of “Russia Under the Old Regime” in 1974. But he achieved much wider renown as a public intellectual deeply skeptical about the American policy of détente with the Soviet Union.

In 1976, he led a group of military and foreign-policy experts, known as Team B, in an ultimately pessimistic analysis of Soviet military strategy and foreign policy. The group’s report, commissioned by the Central Intelligence Agency as a counterweight to an analysis that had been generated by the C.I.A.’s own experts — Team A — helped galvanize conservative opposition to arms-control talks and accommodation with the Soviet Union. And it set the stage for Ronald Reagan’s policy of challenging Soviet foreign policy and seeking to undermine its hold over Eastern Europe.

While writing ambitious histories of the Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik regime, Professor Pipes continued his campaign for a tougher foreign policy toward the Soviet Union in the late 1970s as a member of the neoconservative Committee on the Present Danger and as director of Eastern European and Soviet affairs for President Reagan’s National Security Council.

Despite this public role, he regarded himself, first and foremost, as a historian of Russian history, politics and culture — a field in which he performed with great distinction. A forceful, stylish writer with a sweeping view of history, Professor Pipes covered nearly 600 years of the Russian past in “Russia Under the Old Regime,” abandoning chronology and treating his subject by themes, such as the peasantry, the church, the machinery of state and the intelligentsia.

One of his most original contributions was to locate many of Russia’s woes in its failure to evolve beyond its status as a patrimonial state, a term he borrowed from the German sociologist Max Weber to characterize Russian absolutism, in which the czar not only ruled but also owned his domain and its inhabitants, nullifying the concepts of private property and individual freedom.

With “The Russian Revolution” (1990), Professor Pipes mounted a frontal assault on many of the premises and long-held convictions of mainstream Western specialists on the Bolshevik seizure of power. That book, which began with the simple Russian epigram “To the victims,” took a prosecutorial stance toward the Bolsheviks and their leader, Vladimir Lenin, who still commanded a certain respect and sympathy among Western historians.

Professor Pipes, a moralist shaped by his experiences as a Jew who had fled the Nazi occupation of Poland, would have none of it. He presented the Bolshevik Party as a conspiratorial, deeply unpopular clique rather than the spearhead of a mass movement. He shed new and harsh light on the Bolshevik campaign against the peasantry, which, he argued, Lenin had sought to destroy as a reactionary class. He also accused Lenin of laying the foundation of the terrorist state that his successor, Joseph Stalin, perfected.

“I felt and feel to this day that I have been spared not to waste my life on self-indulgence and self-aggrandizement but to spread a moral message by showing, using examples from history, how evil ideas lead to evil consequences,” Professor Pipes wrote in a memoir. “Since scholars have written enough on the Holocaust, I thought it my mission to demonstrate this truth using the example of communism.”

The British historian Ronald Hingley wrote of “The Russian Revolution” in The New York Times Book Review that “no single volume known to me even begins to cater so adequately to those who want to work through 842 intellectually challenging pages in order to discover what really happened to Russia in and around 1917.”

Other reviewers found Professor Pipes intemperate and, on occasion, blinded by his zeal to redress moral wrongs.

William G. Rosenberg, writing in The Nation, praised Professor Pipes’s “remarkable intellectual range, crystalline style and capacity to muster an extraordinary mass of evidential detail” but complained of “scholarship distorted by passion.”

“Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime,” which was published in 1994 and covered the period from the Russian Civil War to the death of Lenin in 1924, also met with a divided response.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, Professor Pipes emerged as an esteemed Western historian in Russia — a novel experience for a man who had been reviled by Soviet historians throughout his career.

By this time, he had long been prominent as a leading critic of détente and arms-control talks with the Soviet Union, and a loathed figure on the left. “Those who called me a cold warrior apparently expected me to cringe,” he wrote in “Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger” (2003). “In fact, I accepted the title proudly.”

Mr. Pipes joined the recently formed Committee on the Present Danger in 1977. (The group had borrowed its name from a similar, though unrelated, group that had sought to counter Soviet expansion in the immediate postwar years.) The committee was composed of neoconservatives who opposed nuclear-arms talks — “hollow rituals,” as Professor Pipes called them — and supported increased spending on weapons programs.

Perhaps his most public role in challenging American policies toward the Soviet Union came in 1976 under President Gerald R. Ford.

At the time, conservative critics had for several years been attacking the C.I.A.’s National Intelligence Estimate, an annual assessment of the Soviet threat, calling it overly optimistic about Soviet foreign-policy intentions and blind to what they believed to be a dangerous military buildup.

In response, the C.I.A., under pressure from the president’s Foreign Policy Advisory Board, conducted an in-house review of its performance in analyzing Soviet strategic doctrine and military capabilities over the previous decade.

But the resulting report by the C.I.A.’s experts — the so-called Team A — was found to be so deficient that President Ford asked the C.I.A. director, George H. W. Bush, to order a competitive analysis, pitting the agency experts against a team of outsiders.

Professor Pipes, who had been serving as an adviser to Senator Henry M. Jackson of Washington, a Democrat who was a harsh critic of détente, was appointed to lead Team B.

Its conclusion — that the C.I.A. had badly underestimated the “intensity, scope and implicit threat” of Soviet military objectives — later gave ammunition to Ronald Reagan as he took to the campaign trail for the 1980 presidential election espousing a hard line against Moscow.

With Reagan’s victory over President Jimmy Carter in the election, Professor Pipes, taking a leave from Harvard, was appointed director of Eastern European and Soviet affairs at the National Security Council. He again became a lightning rod for the left, which regarded him as a sinister influence on Soviet policy.

He went on to play a pivotal role in drafting National Security Decision Directive 75, which set forth the Reagan administration’s policy toward the Soviet Union. It called for the government to shift the emphasis away from punishing Soviet misbehavior after the fact and to concentrate instead on pursuing policies that would change the nature of the regime.

But by Professor Pipes’s own account, the State Department, headed by Alexander M. Haig, shut the N.S.C. out of most important decisions, and Professor Pipes’s relative inexperience in Washington infighting was seen to have blunted his effectiveness. He left the post after two years, the maximum number Harvard allowed.

Ryszard Edgar Pipes was born on July 11, 1923, in Cieszyn, Poland, where his father, Marek, ran a chocolate factory. His mother, Sara Sofia (Haskelberg) Pipes, who went by Zosia, was a homemaker. The family, which later moved to Cracow and Warsaw, spoke German at home and Polish on the street.

In 1939, soon after German troops entered Warsaw, the Pipeses fled to Italy on forged passports. They reached the United States a year later, settling in Elmira, N.Y.

To further his education, Professor Pipes set about compiling a random list of 100 American colleges from the advertising pages of “Who’s Who,” then sent off postcards to them asking for financial aid and part-time work. Muskingum College in Ohio (now Muskingum University) replied with offers for both.

In 1942, in his junior year, he was drafted into the Army Air Corps and sent to study Russian at Cornell, where he met his future wife, Irene Roth, who survives him.

Besides her and his son Daniel, he is survived by another son, Steven, and four grandchildren. He had homes in Cambridge and in Harrisville, N.H.

Richard Pipes, R.I.P.

BY STEVEN HAYWARD 

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/05/richard-pipes-rip.php

May 17, 2018

Sad news today of the passing of Richard Pipes, the great scholar of Soviet affairs and many other subjects. He was the author of many fine books, including especially his large bookThe Russian Revolution, which is one of the very best accounts of that crucial event.

I only met the great professor once or twice very casually, in a large group at some Washington or New York dinner that I can’t recall precisely.  I did spend two days in the company of his splendid son, Daniel Pipes, last summer in Bulgaria, which I recalled here and here.

I’m most fond of his memoir Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger, which told some of the inside story of his his most important work at the National Security Council under Reagan.  Pipes was crucial in crystalizing what became known as the “Reagan Doctrine,” and he was the principal author of one of the most important documents of the Cold War, NSDD 75, which was a sweeping new direction for U.S. strategy toward the Soviet Union that Reagan approved on January 17, 1983. It could be said to be the blueprint for the endgame of the Cold War. Here’s how I described that episode in The Age of Reagan:

In August 1982 Reagan issued a formal request for a top-to-bottom review of American policy toward the Soviet Union.  Richard Pipes had long wanted to produce a background policy paper explaining a new strategy for Soviet relations, but the NSC’s dysfunctions and opposition from the State Department prevented much progress in 1981. Pipes, among others, had argued that the time had come to reorient America’s Soviet policy from containment to transformation.  The Soviet Union’s expansionism, Pipes wrote in an early NSC paper, would not cease until the Soviet system either collapsed or was thoroughly reformed.  Pipes discerned that Soviet economic weakness could be exploited, and that a reformist faction might come to the fore in Soviet leadership in the near future.  The Soviet Union was ripe for change, provided the West raised the cost of Soviet imperialism and actively encouraged internal reform. . .

Pipes was also the head of the famous CIA “Team B” exercise in 1976, in which the CIA (under director George H.W. Bush) allowed a team of outside experts to produce a rival assessment of Soviet strategy and capabilities. It dod not go well for the CIA’s “Team A.” Again, I have an account of this in the first volume of The Age of Reagan:

New director Bush . . . set in motion the infamous independent group that came to be known as “Team B.” Both the CIA’s regular analysts, “Team A,” and the independent “Team B,” would work independently and be given access to the same raw information.  At the conclusion of their work each team would exchange drafts, after which the President’s national security adviser (by this point Brent Scowcroft had replaced Kissinger as national security adviser) would evaluate the results of the “experiment.”

Team B examined more than just the number of missiles or their “throw weights” (which was a centerpiece of arms control controversies in the 1970s).  Team B thought Soviet missiles were more accurate than previous estimates, and that Soviet efforts at civil defense were more extensive.  Team B’s conclusions were stunning.  “The evidence suggests that the Soviet leaders are first and foremost offensively rather than defensively minded. . .  While hoping to crush the ‘capitalist’ realm by other than military means, the Soviet Union is nevertheless preparing for a Third World War as if it were unavoidable. . .  Within the ten year period of the National Estimate the Soviets may well expect to achieve a degree of military superiority which would permit a dramatically more aggressive pursuit of their hegemonial objectives. . .” (Emphasis in original.)

When Team B met with the official Team A at CIA headquarters in the fall of 1976, the result was a “disaster” for Team A, which emerged from the meeting “badly mauled” according to Team B’s leader Richard Pipes.  “The champion of Team A had barely begun his criticism of team B’s effort, delivered in a condescending tone,” Pipes recalled ten years later, “when a member of Team B [Paul Nitze] fired a question that reduced him to a state of catatonic immobility: we stared in embarrassment as he sat for what seemed an interminable time with an open mouth, unable to utter a sound.”

Pipes’ account has been criticized as partial and self-serving, but the result of the exercise was beyond dispute: Team A’s official NIE 11-3-8 was much tougher than previous NIEs.  In the final report appeared the judgment: ‘[T]he Soviets are striving to achieve war-fighting and war-survival capabilities which would leave the U.S.S.R. in a better position than the U.S. if war occurred.”  “I strongly suspect,” Pipes wrote, “that George Bush intervened to have Team A substantially revise its draft to allow for Team B’s criticism.”  Nevertheless it was the Team B report that made news (even though the report itself remained classified for 18 years, portions of it leaked to the press) and became a rallying point for anti-détente forces.  Some evidence suggests Bush was embarrassed by the Team B report and regretted having supported the exercise.  He opposed making outside competitive analysis like Team B a regular feature of CIA assessments. If true it was probably out of loyalty to his employees at the CIA. . .  Yet Pipes claimed that Bush privately agreed with Team B’s assessment: “I do recall attending a dinner somewhere in 1977 [by which time Bush was a private citizen again] at which Bush spoke to a large audience and fully identified with the Team B point of view.” Needless to say, one person whose embrace of Team B was unequivocal was Ronald Reagan. . .   With election of 1980, Team B would become Team A.

Thank God Pipes and people like him became Team A when they did. We could use more people like him today.

Jonathan Swift in a White Suit

Tom Wolfe's campaign against intellectual idiocy

By  Matthew Continetti

http://freebeacon.com/columns/jonathan-swift-white-suit/

May 18, 2018

Tom Wolfe in his Manhattan apartment, 1987. © Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

In 1965 Tom Wolfe visited Princeton University for a panel discussion of "the style of the Sixties." The author of The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, published that year, was scheduled to appear alongside Günter Grass, Allen Ginsberg, and Paul Krassner. Grass spoke first. The German novelist's remarks, Wolfe wrote later, "were grave and passionate. They were about the responsibility of the artist in a time of struggle and crisis." And they were crudely dismissed by Krassner. "The next thing I knew," Wolfe wrote, "the discussion was onto the subject of fascism in America."

Wolfe was flummoxed, Grass silent as their co-panelists described the nightmares and injustices taking place outside the hall. "Suddenly," Wolfe recollected, "I heard myself blurting out over my microphone: ‘My God, what are you talking about? We're in the middle of a … Happiness Explosion!"

That was not what the crowd wanted to hear. A "tidal wave of rude sounds" drowned out Wolfe. But he found an unexpected ally in Grass, who spoke up once more. "For the past hour I have had my eyes fixed on the doors here," he said. "You talk about fascism and police repression. In Germany when I was a student, they came through those doors long ago. Here they must be very slow."

How little our intellectual climate has changed between that evening in the sixties and Wolfe's death on May 14. America's writers, artists, and thinkers, and their media manqué, continue to argue that our civilization is decadent, sexist, racist, torn asunder, on the verge of succumbing to authoritarianism or fascism, the population impoverished, the environment despoiled, the world made worse by our presence. The chorus of doom and gloom includes the latest issues of both The Atlantic, which chastises "the new American aristocracy" of the "9.9 percent" (the one percent being too exclusive!), and Time, which laments "How Baby Boomers Broke America." And yet, as I write, the unemployment rate is 3.9 percent, per capita disposable income is at a high, and according to Gallup more people are satisfied with the direction of the country than at any time in 13 years.

Tom Wolfe has been celebrated for his literary innovations and output, his sartorial panache, his gimlet eye, his unfailing gentility. But his reputation as a Grand Old Man of Letters should not obscure one of his most important themes: the inability of American intellectuals to understand and appreciate their country.

Educated at Washington and Lee University and Yale, Wolfe held a doctorate in American studies and could reference Weber, Veblen, Durkheim, Nietzsche, and Darwin with the best of them. But he resisted membership in the "herd of independent minds," choosing instead to join the ranks of counter-intellectuals who problematized not middle-class society but its critics on campus, in media, and along the radical frontier of the Democratic Party. Wolfe is often overlooked as a counter-intellectual because his method was not polemic but devastating, irresistible satire. He was Jonathan Swift in a white suit.

Wolfe brought low those figures, institutions, and movements intellectuals hold in esteem, while elevating the factors in society that intellectuals typically condescend to or denigrate outright. Radical chic, the Community Action Plan, modern art and architecture, the New Yorker, literary fiction, the Victorian Gents of the press, well-meaning politicians, the modern university, and Noam Chomsky were his targets. The Good Old Boys, stock-car racers, naval aviators, astronauts, and Cuban-American cops with machismo were his heroes.

If left-wing intellectuals celebrated a trans-valuation of values that privileged the absurd, the surreal, the deviant, the deranged, and the marginal over bourgeois propriety, steadfastness, patriotism, tradition, hierarchy, and manliness, Wolfe did the opposite. His immersive reporting and wicked pen exposed the pretense and self-delusion of intellectuals as he revealed the heroism and nobility of workers, soldiers, parents, cops, and America herself.

How had American intellectuals lost sight of their native ground? How had they turned into a bunch of anti-Panglosses, forever reminding their readers, viewers, and acolytes that America is the worst of all possible worlds? Wolfe traced this phenomenon back to the aftermath of the First World War. As a result of education, travel, and cultural exchange, our scholars, writers, and thinkers became enamored of European modes of thought and expression over American ones. They drank the anisette—and never looked back.

Wolfe put it this way in the introduction to Hooking Up (2000):

American architecture had never recovered from the deadening influence of the German Bauhaus movement of the twenties. American painting and sculpture had never recovered from the deadening influence of various theory-driven French movements, beginning with Cubism early in the twentieth century. In music, the early twentieth-century innovations of George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, Duke Ellington, and Ferde Grofé had been swept away by the abstract, mathematical formulas of the Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg’s influence had faded in the 1990s, but the damage had been done. The American theater had never recovered from the Absurdism of Samuel Beckett, Bertolt Brecht, and Luigi Pirandello.

But, above all, there was the curious case of American philosophy—which no longer existed. It was as if Emerson, Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey had never lived. The reigning doctrine was deconstruction, whose hierophants were two Frenchmen, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. They began with a hyperdilation of a pronouncement of Nietzsche’s to the effect that there can be no absolute truth, merely many ‘truths,’ which are the tools of various groups, classes, or forces. From this, the deconstructionists proceeded to the doctrine that language is the most insidious tool of all. The philosopher’s duty was to deconstruct the language, expose its hidden agendas, and help save the victims of the American ‘Establishment’: women, the poor, nonwhites, homosexuals, and hardwood trees.

This displacement of American literature, art, architecture, music, and philosophy by European imports was complete by the end of the Second World War. But U.S. victory over fascism and imperialism did not lead to a renewed appreciation for or interest in American life. On the contrary: The intellectuals attacked America's conformism, its lonely crowds, its organization men in boring winter clothes, its politicians rooting out Communist Party members from government posts. Moreover, the postwar economic boom had expanded the ranks of intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals. No longer was creative output required for highbrow posturing. And the market for societal self-flagellation was immense.

The intellectual had become not so much an occupational type as a status type. He was like the medieval cleric, most of whose energies were devoted to separating himself from the mob—which in modern times, in Revel’s phrase, goes under the name of the middle class. … Moral indignation was the main thing; that, and a certain pattern of consumption. In fact, by the 1960s it was no longer necessary to produce literature, scholarship, or art—or even to be involved in such matters, except as a consumer—in order to qualify as an intellectual. It was only necessary to live la vie intellectuellle. A little brown bread in a bread box, a lapsed pledge card to CORE, a stereo and a record rack full of Coltrane and all the Beatles albums from Revolver on, white walls, a huge Dracaena marginata plant, which is there because all the furniture is so clean-lined and spare that without this piece of frondose tropical Victoriana the room looks empty, a stack of unread New York Review of Books rising up in a surly mound of subscription guilt, the conviction that America is materialistic, repressive, bloated, and deadened by its Silent Majority, which resides in the heartland, three grocery boxes full of pop bottles wedged in behind the refrigerator and destined (one of these days) for the Recycling Center, a small, uncomfortable European car—that pretty well got the job done.

Replace the brown bread with gluten-free bran muffins, the CORE pledge with a Bernie bumper sticker, the Beatles albums with Spotify, the Dracaena marginata with a rescue beagle mix, and the New York Review with Jacobin, n+1, and We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates, and you too can qualify as an intellectual today.

Intellectuals emphasize the disparity between the ideal and the actual. What Wolfe did was highlight the difference between what intellectuals say and how intellectuals behave. "Maude Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine" is about the materialism of a writer who makes a living denouncing materialism. One of Wolfe's cartoons, "The Famous Writer on the College Lecture Circuit," features a turtle-necked beatnik holding forth at the lectern as he contemplates whether to sleep with the blond co-ed or the redhead one. In "Radical Chic" the nostalgie de la boue of Leonard Bernstein's houseguests begins to wear thin as the Black Panthers discuss what their revolution might entail.

In lampooning the intellectuals, Wolfe was drawing attention to the fact that they, for all their self-flattery and huffiness, are no less human than the rest of us. And to be human means to be flawed, ignorant, obsessed with status, convinced of a "fiction-absolute" that prioritizes your group above all others, weak, easily swayed by the surrounding culture, and captive to the functions and desires of our bodies. What makes intellectuals special and dangerous is that their capacity for self-delusion, shared by us all, can easily be put in the service of terrible ideologies and destructive politics.

A prophet, I presume, enjoys seeing his prophecies come true, but I have the feeling Nietzsche would have become bored by a hundred years of … ‘the intellectual' … I can almost hear that hortatory and apostrophic voice of his: How could you writers and academics have settled for such an easy, indolent role—for so long! How could you have chosen a facile snobbery over the hard work, the endless work, the Herculean work of gaining knowledge? I think he would have shaken his head over their ponderous, amateurish throies of cognition and sexuality. I think he would have grown weary of their dogged skepticism, cynicism, irony, and contempt and would have said, Why don't you admit it to me (no one need know—after all, I'm dead): if you must rate nations, at this moment in history your ‘accursed' America is the very micrometer by which all others must be measured.

And he would have been right.

The job of counter-intellectuals like Tom Wolfe is to stop intellectuals from ruining things for the rest of us. And turn our eyes toward the Happiness Explosion.

The Great One

By Kyle Smith

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/05/tom-wolfe-legendary-writer-rip/

May 15, 2018

Thirty years ago, B.T.W. (before Tom Wolfe), I was an aspiring postmodern novelist. An undergraduate in the Yale English department, I marinated in the wordplay of James Joyce. I steeped myself in Thomas Pynchon. I would write novels that would sell in the tens. On the side, I would deconstruct other people’s novels, locate the damning signifiers that were hidden deep within, undetected even by their authors. Then a friend gave me a stack of unwanted books from a class she had completed. One of them was The Right Stuff.

To this day, no book has ever hit me harder. The acuity of Wolfe’s social analysis, the depth of his reporting, and most of all the mad, exhilarating gallop of his prose style rerouted my mind, redirected my intentions. Wolfe’s impassioned admiration for the courage and ingenuity of test pilot Chuck Yeager and the Mercury space-program astronauts jarred all my ironic, postmodernist, Ivory Tower assumptions. I was a Mike Dukakis–loving liberal Democrat, but in the book’s jovial respect for what would later be known as red-state culture (it was Wolfe who popularized the phrase “good ol’ boy”) came the first low rumblings that I might someday become patriotic, maybe even conservative.

I was taking a class in the Literature department. Literature was completely different from English. In English we read books. In Literature we “decoded” “texts.” In English our purpose was to suss out the author’s meaning. In Literature our purpose was brutally to impose our own meanings on the author. If the author couldn’t possibly have meant what we claimed, it just made our arguments that much cleverer. Then I read Wolfe’s book-length 1975 essay of art criticism, The Painted Word. In barely 100 pages, Wolfe essentially dismantled everything Yale was teaching me about art and criticism. Wolfe exposed how critics think, how they determine taste for a gullible but intellectually insecure broader public. He proved it was possible, if only for a supremely self-confident observer such as himself, to maintain common sense and ignore the experts’ shallow, socially needy, self-serving standards, their vacuous quest for “authenticity” and their fatuous attachment to bohemia, what he famously dubbed radical chic in still another book I devoured.

Wolfe, who had both attended Yale (where he got a Ph.D. in American Studies) and been a reporter for my hometown newspaper (the Springfield Union in Massachusetts), also turned out to be the Class Day speaker at my 1989 graduation. He was my new role model, and so he would remain. I ditched Joyce and Pynchon and turned my sights to journalism, criticism, contrarianism — Wolfeism. Never again would I take it on faith that what my betters were telling me was true or right. Always I would question prevailing orthodoxy.

Tom Wolfe wrote a culture-defining book, and then he did it again, and then he did it again, and maybe even yet again. At the end of 1968’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, he captured the disillusionment of hippie utopianism in three words he set down from Ken Kesey: “We blew it.” Borrowed by Peter Fonda for the following year’s hippie blockbuster Easy Rider, they became the self-chastening summation of a decade of wasted youth. When The Bonfire of the Vanities hit in 1987, everyone who had been struggling to define Eighties New York knew they had been bested. The dead center of the target had been struck. Wolfe caught the metropolis in between two covers, with his merciless Al Sharpton lampoon the Reverend Bacon, his British tabloid hack Peter Fallow (sometimes said to be based on Christopher Hitchens, but more likely the party-page fixture Anthony Haden-Guest), his “social X-rays” who were “starved to perfection.” Walking around this preposterous and prodigious city, I often think of Rawlie Thorpe’s words to Sherman McCoy: “If you want to live in New York, you’ve got to insulate, insulate, insulate.” Nearly matching Bonfire’s panoramic scope is 1998’s equally Zola-tinged novel A Man in Full, reckoning with race, real estate, and debt in Atlanta. No student of Wolfe should put off reading this masterpiece either.

Six years later came what turned out to Wolfe’s last essential novel and the one that is most pertinent today: the campus saga I Am Charlotte Simmons, which upon its appearance in 2004 was derided by the New York Times’ enduringly useless critic Michiko Kakutani in a calculated preemptive attack well before the book’s publication. Kakutani claimed, in one of the most obtuse reviews in a career ardently dedicated to being wrong, that Wolfe “does not tackle the zeitgeist” but merely belabored the obvious: “that students crave sex and beer, love to party.” Writing for the New York Times Book Review under the derisive headline “Peeping Tom,” Jacob Weisberg also suggested Wolfe was a naïve old prude and mocked him for perceiving any problems with college partying, saying Charlotte’s point of view boiled down to “And — oh my God! — They’re havin’ say-yex!” Adds Weisberg, “The omniscient narrator refrains from explicit condemnation of what Charlotte surveys, but disgust is evident in his sober stare.” He goes on to ask, incredulously, “Is this hellish vision of sex, drunks and gangsta rap the real life of American college students today?”

In fact I Am Charlotte Simmons was and is blisteringly on-point. It’s a portrayal of a flourishing girl who is sent reeling into depression after being used like a disposable sex doll by the fraternity-ruled hookup culture at a Duke-like southern university. The entire novel is an early air-raid siren for what feminists today call “rape culture” and what parents of daughters most fear: That their girls’ sense of self-worth will be destroyed by the predatory sex scene. That a then-74-year-old author was able to identify and illuminate this alarming cultural trend even as cultural commandants insisted there was nothing to see here stands as one of the most astounding feats of journalism this century.

Wolfe was on more than one occasion an honored guest of National Review or National Review Institute, giving (for instance) the address at the William F. Buckley Prize dinner in New York City last October in one of his last public appearances, but his conservatism was overstated. He voted for Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama and habitually voted for the winner in every presidential election, except when he picked Mitt Romney in 2012 and Ross Perot in 1992. What really drove the Left crazy about Wolfe was his habit of wicked, ruthless noticing of the foibles of so many of their most cherished icons, and how he trained his satiric force on them. For half an American century he scythed through folly, from the Merry Pranksters on the West Coast to the Pantheristas in Leonard Bernstein’s penthouse on Park Avenue. It’s a commonplace to say he was our Zola, our Trollope. But he was also our Mencken.

KYLE SMITH — Kyle Smith is National Review’s critic-at-large. @rkylesmith