The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –
So as I was watching the Jonathan Tropper film Kodachrome last night on Netflix, putting me in an unusually nostalgic mood about an obsolete type of photography film, when my email notification bleep went off and I saw that the writer Tom Wolfe died at the age of 88.
The first news came from Rolling Stone magazine, which reported that he died in a New York hospital of an “unspecified infection.”
I doubt that’s true. He probably died from Trumpism, a new disease among smart, educated people — especially in New York and Washington — who do not want to live in a world where the likes of Donald Trump is president of the United States. I think he figured out, too late, that who the president is matters.
Wolfe often said in interviews that he never covered politics because it doesn’t matter who the president is in the U.S. He even had the unmitigated gall to berate Hunter Thompson for wasting his time on American politics.
“Oh, I think writing about politics was probably one of the biggest mistakes Hunter ever made,” Wolfe said. “I believe he is interested in it, which astounds me. I think his gifts, which are tremendous, are wasted on American politics, except possibly in an event like Watergate – which he didn’t write about, I don’t think. Because this country is so stable politically. It really is an extremely stable country.”
First of all, of course Hunter Thompson wrote about Watergate. He wrote an entire book about it: Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72.
Second, it’s not a stable country anymore, if it ever really was. Maybe it appeared that way in the 1950s when Wolfe was attending Washington and Lee and Yale. But the truth is this new world experiment in democracy has always teetered on the brink of disaster, from the American Revolution and the War of 1812 to the Civil War, from World Wars 1 and 2 to Vietnam and 9/11. George W. Bush was too dumb to totally destroy it and Barack Obama played it too safe to totally save it. Trump could well be the end of it, and I think Wolfe finally realized that.
I could be wrong, of course, but at least upon his death, I found and read an interview he did with Rolling Stone in August, 1980, about the time I had my vision by the swimming pool and made the fateful decision to go on parole from Rock ‘n’ Roll and get into journalism in college myself. [See the full story in my memoir, Jump On The Bus].
Perhaps if I had read the interview at the time, I might have made a different decision. You see about the time I decided I wanted to be a newspaper reporter, the business was already on the way to being taken over by corporations and public relations men and women.
Look at this excerpt, which is even more prescient today that it was in 1980.
Hell, to this day you can’t get anything in newspapers. I think of this as the period of incredible shrinking news. I’m really convinced that there’s less news covered in America now than at any time in this century. Television creates the impression that there’s all this news because the press has become very incestuous and writes stories about the press, with all these marvelous phony wars about television and what it does or doesn’t do. But television as a news medium has no reporting at all, really, except for some cosmetic reporting done by so-called Washington correspondents, who usually stand in front of some government building with a microphone covered in black sponge rubber, reading AP or UPI copy. In effect, every shred of news on television comes from either the wire services or from nonevents, to use Daniel Boorstin’s phrase – the press conference, the basketball game and so on. So you then have to ask, “What are the wire services giving us?” Well, the wire services are totally creatures of local newspapers. Those big wire services just cannibalize local newspapers.
Suddenly you’re up against the fact that there’s no competition in most parts of the country at all. I doubt if there are five cities where there is still newspaper competition. There’s a little bit left in Los Angeles, a little bit left in Boston and some in New York, but not much. Maybe one or two other places. When this happens, the monopoly newspaper cuts back on its staff – always happens. They just stop covering local events – too expensive. And they’ll hire children from journalism schools at the lowest possible scale. They’ll let them work for a couple of years, send them to the Statehouse, ’cause at the Statehouse they can pick up four or five stories a day handed out by public relations people. That’s your local coverage – canned items from the Statehouse. When these people have had enough experience to begin getting good, getting a feel for reporting, they manage to get rid of them or ease them out of the job because they will be wanting more money. They also will be wanting to create heat; it’s very hard for a managing editor – an older man – to resist if a young reporter says, “Look, I dug up a hot story.” There’s still enough pride in the business, so it’s hard to say, “Well, forget it, kid, we’re not interested in hot stories here. We just want the wire-service stuff and a few handouts from the State-house and that’s it.”
So really, what you’re seeing on television via the wire services is just getting smaller and smaller. It’s really very sad. I don’t know how much corruption there is at the local level, but there’s never been a better time in the century for there to be corruption in local government, because the press is not gonna spot it.
Of course Wolfe was very proud of the letter he once received from Hunter Thompson after Wolfe proposed to include Thompson in his book on New Journalism. Here it is.
March 3, 1971
Woody Creek, CODear Tom…
You worthless scumsucking bastard. I just got your letter of Feb 25 from Le Grande Hotel in Roma, you swine! Here you are running around fucking Italy in that filthy white suit at a thousand bucks a day laying all kinds of stone gibberish & honky bullshit on those poor wops who can’t tell the difference . . . while I’m out here in the middle of these goddamn frozen mountains in a death-battle with the taxman & nursing cheap wine while my dogs go hungry & my cars explode and a legion of nazi layers makes my life a goddamn Wobbly nightmare…
You decadent pig. Where the fuck do you get the nerve to go around telling those wops that I’m crazy? You worthless cocksucker. My Italian tour is already arranged for next spring & I’m going to do the whole goddamn trip wearing a bright red field marshal’s uniform & accompanied by six speed-freak bodyguards bristling with Mace bombs & when I start talking about American writers & the name Tom Wolfe comes up, by god, you’re going to wish you were born a fucking iguana!!
OK for that, you thieving pile of albino warts. You better settle your goddamn affairs because your deal is about to go down. “Unprofessorial,” indeed! You scurvy wop! I’ll have your goddamn femurs ground into bone splinters if you ever mention my name again in connection with that horrible “new journalism” shuck you’re promoting.
Ah, this greed, this malignancy! Where will it end? What filthy weight in your soul has made you sink so low? Doctor Bloor was wright! Hyenas are taking over the world! Oh Jesus!!! What else can I say? Except to warn you, once again, that the hammer of justice looms, and that your filthy white suit will become a flaming shroud!
Sincerely,
Hunter
Of course it was all in jest.
Many other writers liked to take pot shots at Wolfe, including Norman Mailer, which you can read about all over the place thanks to Google, the web and an internet connection.
I’m sure he would have agreed that the writing business is about pretense as much as talent, as is art, something he liked to criticize like he was Thackery, the British satirist, or Balzac, the French novelist and playwright who took apart that society in a way that earned him kudos as one of the founders of “literary realism” and the title “the French Dickens” after Charles Dickens, the English writer and social critic.
Of course the most pretentious newspaper of them all, the New York Times, gave Wolfe his due upon his death, as it should.
Speaking of the Times, the new publisher wrote the story that inspired the film “Kodochrome” back in 2010.
For Kodachrome Fans, Road Ends at Photo Lab in Kansas
Personally I was not enough of a photographer to be in love with film and developing chemicals. I like digital photography way better. I’m also not nostalgic for vinyl, when digital music is cleaner and brighter too, without those scratchy sounds from albums and record players.
But I must say I am nostalgic for a time when presidents took being president seriously and at least aspired to a touch of good character and class, even if they weren’t born to it.
A lot of good people seem to by dying in the time of Trump. Look at these lists.
I have a few more things to say before I go, so I will do my best not to join them. I want to be around to see him go down. Now that will be fun to write about.
