"They took the bar! The whole fucking bar!"---John Blutarsky, United States Senate
I could go on and on about the ways Tom Wolfe and his new book annoy me---some of you are aware that I have gone on and on, but, take my word for it, I was restrained.---but one of the ways it's annoying me right now is that Wolfe's novel and the conservative whine with which he's been shilling for it are libels and slanders against an on the whole much nicer generation of college kids than have populated campuses in decades.
The comment on this post by Phoebe Maltz is what has set me off again.
A choice sample:
"The school has co-ed dorms, turns a blind eye to cohabitation in them, and gives the fraternities free rein to throw booze-soaked orgies every weekend [and during the week in some cases]. Also, the school either does not assign enough work to keep students from being able to indulge excessively in such distractions, or they are not making the consequences of slipshod scholarship painful enough to have an effect."
Maltz doesn't bother to respond to the comment. Too bad. She's a senior at the University of Chicago. I'm sure she could have corroborated the commentor on her school's slipshod standards.
"The sexual liberation movement on the left may not have wanted their agitations to lead to more hetero blond beast jock hookups, but that's what resulted. It's called the law of unintended consequences."
See, says the commentor, it's those damn liberals' fault that pure-hearted jock boys have become rutting pigs.
Which is exactly Wolfe's thesis.
I Am Charlotte Simmons portrays an essentially Republican social scene---status seeking, wealth obsessed, centered on sports, fraternities and sororities, anti-intellectual, and hedonistic---and then blames its decline into debauchery on liberals.
Which liberals though? The liberals on the college faculty?
Let's put it to a faculty vote. Yay or nay, do we keep frats, sororities, and sports on campus or throw them all off?
What do you think the outcome will be?
Wolfe's done this before, in Bonfire of the Vanities, in which he somehow managed to find that the awful yuppie subculture of greed in New York City in Ronald Reagan's Morning in America 1980's was the fault of the Welfare State.
So in I Am Charlotte Simmons he's not singing a new song.
We're supposed to believe that decadent liberal thinking is somehow responsible for the fact that frat boys and jocks drink a lot of beer, don't do their homework, and spend a great deal of time and energy trying to get girls to go to bed with them, as if this is something new.
Ahem.
Animal House was believably set in the pre-Free Speech Movement early 60s. Senator Blutarsky is likely a Republican.
Otter's a gynecologist in Beverly Hills. Think he and his pals at the country club are voting Democratic?
D-Day's whereabouts are unknown, but if I wanted to find him I'd start looking in Idaho among the guys in the Patriot Movement.
The social scene Wolfe condemns in his novel is both conservative and generations old.
The most famous recent college grads who most resemble the slackers and wastrels Wolfe populated his book with are the Bush twins.
The biggest problem on campus, the most deadly, is not drugs or promiscuity. It's binge drinking, and guess who supplies the booze?
It's not the kids in ACT-Up or WHO.
But Wolfe and his defenders have found it useful to pretend that the frat boys of the 1950s were paragons of virtue compared to kids today.
My goddaughter is a junior in the honors program at her school. I know from her mother's reports that for my goddaughter and her friends and peers hard work to the point of overwork is the norm. These kids study very hard and pile on the extra-curricular activities. They are socially engaged. They have part time jobs. They get internships. They break their backs at school. They are far more intelligent, far better students, and far better people than my generation of college students, and we weren't all that bad.
They are better than the generation of college students I taught, and those kids were an improvement on us.
It's not surprising that they're harder workers. They have to be. When I was applying to college, a B plus A minus student like me had a good shot of getting into an Ivy League school. In fact, I was accepted at Brown and I didn't even apply!
My goddaughter was a straight A student and she was turned down by all of her first choice schools.
So were most of her honor student friends.
But I don't know why they are so much better people, why they are nicer, politer, and friendlier than we were.
They were, after all, raised by baby boomers.
The truly curious thing about them is that they seem to like adults.
Yes, I am prejudiced and I know my sample is small. But from everything I've heard and read, from what I've observed in java joints across the land and in lines at movie theaters and while being waited on in restaurants, bookstores, and Blockbuster, I think it's safe to say that Tom Wolfe and his minions can go pound salt.
A quick tour of the blogworld turns up whole gangs of smart, serious-minded, hardworking, and from all appearances decent-hearted college students, grad students, and recent graduates.
There's Jesse Taylor and Ezra Klein at Pandagon.
Will Baude and his cohorts at Crescat Sententia.
Phoebe Maltz and her partners at What Would Phoebe Do?
Lindsay Beyerstein is a bit older, with an MA already under her belt, but she is young enough that kids she went to college with were still in school when Tom Wolfe did his much vaunted (by himself) reporting.
And I'm sure Wolfe talked to her friends, and to all the above, and the many, many college students like them.
It's all in his notes.
Somewhere.
Damn.
Makes me want to...
Shout!
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