Thursday, August 13, 2020

Where's Tom Wolfe When We Need Him?

Just imagine the fun the late Tom Wolfe (author of "Radical Chic" and other pieces skewering the counterculture) would have had with the zany idea that looting Macy's and the Rolex Store constitutes a legitimate form of reparations for slavery. 

The days of looting the corner liquor store or food store, of running off with diapers and Mad Dog 2020, largely seem behind us in America. That's so 1967 or 1968 (or maybe 1992, in LA's case). Most of today's looters have developed much more refined -- dare I say "bourgeois" or even "capitalist"? -- tastes in the businesses they plunder, which is especially ironic given the Marxist slogans many of the new revolutionaries spew. 

How and when did our poor and downtrodden develop such expensive tastes in clothing and accessories? What does that say about the way we define "poverty" and "the underprivileged" today? Wolfe would have had such a ball tackling such questions. But we have no journalists today who can even see the ironies and absurdities, much less bring them to life in print.


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