Bonfire of the Vanities, a Sequel

When Tom Wolfe dramatized the Age of Greed in the 1980s, his novel satirizing the downfall of a Wall Street Master of the Universe was not taken as prophecy, but reality is overtaking his art.

Now David Brooks, the New York Times pop sociologist in residence, is declaring that "after the TARP, the auto bailout, the stimulus package, the Fed rescue packages and various other federal interventions, rich people no longer get to set their own rules.

"Now lifestyle standards for the privileged class are set by...Democratic staffers, regulators, journalists, lawyers, Obama aides and senior civil servants" who "get to insert themselves into the intricacies of upscale life, influencing when private jets can be flown, when friends can lend each other their limousines and at what golf resorts corporate learning retreats can be held."

Brooks exaggerates, of course, but the trend is undeniable. Automakers flying private jets to ask for government handouts, huge bonuses for Wall Street bunglers and $35,000 commodes for an executive washroom are inflaming a public beset by job losses, home foreclosures and shrinking retirement plans.

The automakers, no matter how badly they have mismanaged their industry, are still in the business of producing something to be used. Their Wall Street counterparts, on the other hand, have been engaged in making huge amounts of money by managing money, a set of skills that 21st century America has overvalued even more than running around an athletic field or making faces for a movie camera.

The traditional economy that depended on goods and professional services has receded into the background (even health care is dominated by not by healers but insurance company money manipulators).

In the dire days ahead, one consolation may be a true Bonfire of the Vanities, in which there is a return to valuing the work of those who build the structures of society and keep it going rather than the Masters of the Universe who play Monopoly with real money and destroy lives.

Grand Old Man of the New Journalism

At 78, Tom Wolfe is being immortalized with the reissue of ten of his books in covers "designed to appeal to a new generation."

But before he is embalmed as a writer of satirical novels like "Bonfire of the Vanities," someone should remind readers how he helped change the face of American journalism and, in no small degree, politics.

In August 1966, a Tiffany-engraved invitation arrived in my mail to have cocktails and canapés in the Park Avenue duplex of Mr. and Mrs. Leonard Bernstein to meet the Black Panthers. A sense of the ridiculous prompted me to decline.

But Tom Wolfe went, notebook in hand, and wrote "Radical Chic" for New York Magazine, a classic of the New Journalism that skewered the pretensions of upscale liberals parading their sympathy for the downtrodden in a setting of ostentatious luxury. ("The very idea of them, these real revolutionaries, who actually put their lives on the line, runs through Lenny's duplex like a rogue hormone...These are no civil-rights Negroes wearing gray suits three times too big...)

Along with Gay Talese, Jimmy Breslin, Norman Mailer and others, Wolfe invented the New Journalism in the 1960s to open space for human expression in the growing thicket of corporate journalism.

Reporters became novelists, novelists morphed into reporters to break through the limits of who, what, when, where, why and how. Mailer's story of the march on the Pentagon to protest Vietnam filled an entire issue of Harper's and made newspaper and TV accounts look like tracts on whaling compared to "Moby Dick."

But it was Tom Wolfe who epitomized the best of I-witness journalism. Unlike imitators, he adhered to the traditional rules of reporting while using a fictional style to show what people did and why with an eye for the telling details. For better or worse, his influence is visible in magazine and newspaper reporting to this day.

Recently he sat down with editors of the New York Times Book Review and gave them an oral history of his part in inventing the New Journalism. Even if you disagree, as I do, with many of his social and political views, the Man in the White Suit is an historic and fascinating figure in 20th and 21st century American life.