Aaaaaaaaaaaaannnnnnnnnnnddddddddddd—hey woooweee boyeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee—so I picked up the Tom Wolfe—Tom! Wolfe! with the supercool hip & ready-to-wear whitesuit oh you know—reader The Purple Decades? at the Amarillo Public Library book sale? this year?, and—woweee zippooo—I just started reading the thing, 394 pages of words and ultrahip midcentury typography. And—
Oh—
Honey—it had been several years since I last read any real journalism by the dude, and I’d quite forgotten what a supercool streamlined and incrediblydeadrighton journalist the man was before—you said it—getting all corrupted & ruined by trying to write—how you say—fiction fiction and being badly parodied by provincial bloggers and all.
But there was always one thing about Tom Wolfe that I always thought was so plain—so obvious—so absolutely right there on the surface of everything the man wrote that you didn’t have to point it out, even. It was this: since Wolfe used fiction-like devices such as interior monologues that reconstructed people’s thoughts and different voices (the devil’s advocate, the “directors” voice, etc.) in his writing, you couldn’t just lift a bit of writing and infer Wolfe’s own viewpoint.
I mean, obviously. But right there in the introduction to The Purple Decades, Joe David Bellamy points out that the critic Thomas R. Edwards had taken portions of The Pump House Gang all-too-literally and stated that Wolfe’s
general view of “serious” social concern makes the passage a virtual endorsement of the attitudes it mimics.Hmph. Well, maybe, if we r-e-a-l-l-y s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d and used that ugly word “virtual” in the millennial sense we could say yeah, sure, mebbe ya gotta point there, Thomas R. Edwards.
Otherwise, you just hafta say, um, Thomas? Irony? Hello?
I mean, c’mon, like the preacher said there’s nothing new under the sun. Dramatic irony’s been around since Sophocles and educated readers/listeners/viewers have been expected to understand it since then. Even uneducated people with their wits about them have usually been able to see that people don’ always mean zactly what they say, ‘specially if they grew up in a family full of sarcastic Celts. And it was my understanding as a child of the 80s that some understanding of irony had long ago been extended by way of MTV and Spy magazine far into the ranks of even the truly dim.
But apparently not so far.
Because during the Amarillo Globe-Republican catchup reading I’ve been doing over the past week after running hither-and-yon across the country for most of July, I uncovered a Mallard Fillmore plotline that started thus:
[okay! I know! Mallard Fillmore! Much as I hate that damn cartoon bird, I used to agree with all y’all that he’s not worth the trouble. But I’ve since come to the conclusion that he’s useful in a certain way: he’s the Classics Illustrated of Republican Right-Wing Talking Points. And I use him the way I use Classics Illustrated in the high school Literature classes I teach: not as a substitute for the original, but as a review. So, in this case, we’re reviewing how stone-dumb the sources of those talking points can be. So bear with me . . . ]
. . . I uncovered a Mallard Fillmore (5 July) plotline that started thus:
BADLY DRAWN CARTOON BIRD: People keep e-mailing me to tell me I’m in Jon Stewart’s book, “America” . . . Wait a minute! . . . this isn’t ME . . . it’s an IMPOSTER! [continued . . . ]The series goes on to claim (6 July) that Stewart deliberately misled readers by trying to portray the cartoon in his book as an actual Mallard Fillmore ‘toon. Bruce Tinsley, the putative “cartoonist,” then throws up (8 July) some of his most favoritist logical fallacies—straw people—to argue that his own “put[ting] words into people's mouths” is somehow different than Stewart’s. And, overall, Tinsley winds up looking like a thin-skinned jerk.
Because the cartoon in question—which portrays the idiotic bird offering up some typical right-wing propaganda and then saying “I forgot to tell a joke” is so obviously, so plainly a parody that only a retrograde Thomas R. Edwards could miss the point.
And Tinsley wastes one of the worst weeks his beloved Republicans have had in literally years bitching about it.
Oh—
Honey—
Grow up, Mallard. At this rate, we’ll be having duck for thanksgiving dinner this year.
Mmmm, mmmm, good.
SPACEDARK
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