“Do you remember when we used to live in the Village, the way I used to go off to work?”In the very end of the book, the Epilogue, we get a fictional article in The New York Times, telling us what's happened to McCoy in the year since the events we've been reading about, and here we see a recurrence of the Black Power salute:
“The way you used to go off to work?”
“When I first started working for Pierce & Pierce? The way I used to give you the raised left fist when I left the apartment, the Black Power salute?”
“Yes, I remember.”
“You remember why?”
“I guess so.”
“It was supposed to say that yes, I was going to work on Wall Street, but my heart and soul would never belong to it. I would use it and rebel and break with it. You remember all that?”
Judy said nothing.
“I know it didn’t work out that way,” he went on, “but I remember what a lovely feeling it was. Don’t you?”
Mrs. McCoy and her daughter reportedly have moved to the Midwest, but Mrs. McCoy was in the spectator section of the courtroom yesterday, apparently unrecognized by the noisy group of demonstrators, black and white, who occupied most of the seats. At one point, Mr. McCoy looked toward his wife, smiled slightly, and raised his left hand in a clenched-fist salute. The meaning of this gesture was unclear. Mrs. McCoy refused to speak to reporters.A few thoughts:
1. I think it's pretty clear that McCoy is going to be convicted of manslaughter in this new trial. He gestures to his wife, who's not so estranged that she doesn't sit among the spectators to support him.
2. McCoy has become a new man over the course of his ordeal, but he's also returned to the old man that he was once was, the young man who lived in the Village and gave his wife the Black Power salute as he left in the morning to go work at his Wall Street job.
3. What did the Black Power salute mean to him (and to her)? We could decide that it meant what he said it meant: "I was going to work on Wall Street, but my heart and soul would never belong to it. I would use it and rebel and break with it"? Did it mean the same thing at that later point? If so, then he was fulfilling his stated destiny, rebelling and breaking with Wall Street. Then the salute seems to mean that he is the master of his fate, even though outwardly, government holds the power and is about to crush him.
4. How dare this privileged white man adopt the salute that belongs to black people — especially as he's accused of killing a black person and driving away and not reporting it (as if black lives don't matter)! Or was the salute a misappropriation in the old days, back in the Village, but not now, as he's lost all his privilege and caught in the government's machine?
5. What life awaits Mrs. McCoy, out there in the Midwest? I think she'll do just fine, in part because of the gesture, the meaning of which was unclear to the NYT, but it was clear to her. She's gone back home to Wisconsin.
6. Let's also talk, more generally, about the fascination white Americans have with the idea of ourselves as rebels and the delusion that what we are doing is somehow not really what we are and that our "heart and soul" are really out there in some other life, one that we're not living at all.
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55 comments:
of course, The Big Question is: Is Wisconsin Really Part of the midwest?
Wisconsin? To teach Women Studies at Madison?
This Black Power salute was just a fake 60’s thing to say they were fighting The Man. Allegedly.
But Sherman and his wife are just like the Clintons: sell outs for money.
Hillary, in particular, played that role to a T.
Radical bobo poseur?
fighting The Man.
Punch myself in the nose. I won!
that passage struck me when I first read it, now recall around the same time Hillary Clinton was writing similar sentiments, in the law journal, surrounding the trial regarding alex rackley's murder,
now if Malcolm had not been assassinated by Farrakhan's faction, would the panther's have much purchase, probably because they had fans among deluded white radicals, one remember that tom hayden really hated bobby kennedy,
kingman Brewster, the grandfather to jordana Brewster, of fast and furious, was addicted to such cant, as president of yale university,
In today's world, he would have been accused of giving a Nazi salute in the article.
She “reportedly moved” to the Midwest. Things aren’t what they seem.
The category of the gesture is universal.
In every society there is a machismo to rebellion, banditry, outsiderdom.
Its common to adopt traits suggesting such, as a pose, perhaps.
Its also a consolation for people who feel themselves losing, or in competition against superior rivals. Its a romantic pose.
Examples abound. In Spanish culture the equivalent of rap and black-rebellion symbols used by white people (Hah, Tom Wolfe did this in other pieces too) is identification with gypsies. This goes back a long way. Gypsies were underclass, thieves and scammers and dancers and musicians, always cutting each other up with knives, perpetually rousted by the Guardia Civil, and nobody wanted actual gypsies around. But in Spanish popular culture gypsies were the epitome of cool. People loved to pretend to be gypsies. The more edgy hung out with gypsies.
And elsewhere etc., you find this everywhere. Maybe its hard coded.
The end of "Bonfire", thematically, also feeds into "A Man in Full", in dealing with the depths of adversity. Sherman presumably goes to jail, so how does he learn to deal there? Wolfe goes there, with other characters.
"Let's also talk, more generally, about the fascination white Americans have with the idea of ourselves as rebels."
It's gonna be a short conversation, I'm afraid, since the premise is invalid. On the other hand, we're talking about fiction, so anything goes. Let's talk, more generally, about the fascination white American women have with the idea of themselves as capable of drawing empirically valid generalizations from make-believe stories.
well bill ayers was the scion of a utilities owner, who fancied himself che Guevara, that really wasn't in his skill set, so he followed the Leninist model.
accused of giving a Nazi salute
Where the raised fist with tightly clenched fingers persists as a gesture of close aggression and threat of violence, the open hand in a forward position is a gesture of greeting, and a non-threatening move to broach the human-canine divide.
The rebellious gesture is a common reaction to despair.
Men who perceive they have lost everything react in various ways.
Wolfe explores a few.
Societies have patterns for this. The Filipino one was long established. Desperate men go to the jungle hills to join whatever "Tulisan" outfit is current. Tulisanes are a cross between bandit and rebel - think Pancho Villa. The Maoist-Communist movement only exists at this point as they have, out in the hills, taken on this social role, as the organizing structure of the Tulisanes. Before them the inevitable bandit-rebels were anticolonialist, or religious dissidents/cultists, etc.
And, yes- he is going to get to convicted in the second trial.
The clenched fist dates to communist and anarchist factions in Spain.
It became popular in leftist media globally due to the hugely effective propaganda of the time of the Spanish Civil War. The "black power" people appropriated it from their political allies and mentors in the American left.
it there anything left of the huk movement, who bedeviled the post war regime, ironic that the republic did as much to slaughter the anarchists,
In Times-speak the Midwest starts at Bayonne.
Narciso,
I doubt it. Their remnant, and moreover their social role, was taken over by the Maoist NPA. And the Huks themselves were successors to earlier peasant rebels, and so on. Rebellion is as much a social function as a political one.
The "empirically valid generalization" is Wolfe's.
And it is valid, across humanity. Everyone can be a rebel, or can perceive himself a rebel, in potential at least.
Truly the most intransigent station in Miami, bears the name of the independence commandoes the mambis
On the other hand, we're talking about fiction, so anything goes. Let's talk, more generally, about the fascination white American women have with the idea of themselves as capable of drawing empirically valid generalizations from make-believe stories.
Not just “American women” have a notion that it’s possible to see something very like “truth” in art — even “fictional” art. Polymath physicist Jacob Bronowski put the matter thusly (quoting…):
No one who stops to think about Anna Karenina today believes that it is without morality, and that it makes no judgement on the complex actions of its heroine, her husband, and her lover. On the contrary, we find it a deeper and more moving book than a hundred conventional novels about that triangle, because it shows so much more patient, more understanding, and more heartbreaking an insight into the forces which buffet men and women. It is not a conventional book, it is a true book. And we do not mean by truth some chance correspondence with the facts in a newspaper about a despairing woman who threw herself under a train. We mean that Tolstoy understood people and events, and saw within them the interplay of personality, passion, convention, and the impact on them of the to-and-fro of outside happenings. No ethic and no set of values has our respect now which does not recognize the truth in this.
(/unQuote)
(Jacob Bronowski, The Common Sense of Science, Harvard University Press, 1951)
the fascination white Americans have with the idea of ourselves as rebels and the delusion that what we are doing is somehow not really what we are
I don't think it's so much the fascination of white Americans as it is the fascination of all people, not just Americans, and certainly not just white Americans. Not necessarily that we see ourselves as rebels. But I do think it is common to view your life as somehow not really what you are, or were meant to be, or think you should be (or should have been). Virtually all the guys down at Bowen's Bar think that's true. And that's good enough for me. It's almost happy hour now and I have to go do what I was born to do.
I'm giving you a left handed clenched fist salute on my way out.
Didn't Mussolini's Blackshirts and Young Fascists also favor the raised fist salute? I remember when I saw BILLY JACK (spoiler ahead), and how at the end, as BJ is being escorted to the pokey, his hippie admirers all line up and give the raised fist salute. I thought: Wow, so many "free spirits" and "nonconformists" acting like so many Young Fascists. Back then it was surprising. Today, not so much.
... the delusion that what we are doing is somehow not really what we are and that our "heart and soul" are really out there in some other life, one that we're not living at all.
Following Temujin's comment, I think this is an almost universal human trait (failing?) but that said, I can't think of a more succinct expression of this than what is quoted above. And that's reason #783 why this archive (blog to you) is one of my first-reads every day.
I thought the use of the "black Power" salute was supposed to show what a phony baloney McCoy was. The whole story shows McCoy never cared a damn for black folks. Of course, he thought of himself as a "Rebel" in the feeble - completely safe way that- well-off white folks always do. But of course, their "rebellion" never hurts them, just other - less well-off people.
But there's one thing: McCoy is no longer "insulted". I suspect that in Prison, he would use his brainpower to help the other inmates, and become a advocate for "Prisoner Rights". Cf: John Elhlichmann.
Also, its another brilliant example of Wolfe's ability to write things that can be interpreted in so many different ways.
I wouldn't be surprised if McCoy and his wife had a Malcolm X poster in their Greenwich Apartment.
White Leftists LOVE Malcolm X. Especially the well-to-do ones. At first I was puzzled by it but then I realized, what do rich/well-to-do white people dislike more than anything? Working class Whites! So by helping "poor blacks" they're also hurting ( in an indirect way) their class enemy. All the while feeling good about being for the oppressed minority. Its a win-win.
Its like immigration. They're helping the poor immigrant AND getting cheap labor. No wonder they're so moralistic about it.
Its astounding how few society "rebels" go against their own self-interest.
#6. Agree with others, not so much the rebel thing, but the idea that we often think of ourselves as something other than the life we’re living. All the time I practiced law I played the blues harp and guitar and went to many concerts, thinking of myself still as a musician/hippie type. Even more so when the kids grew up (gotta be an adult for them).
I suspect that all the time Althouse was teaching law she still thought of herself, in part, as the artist she once studied to be.
I think to Sherman it means, "Fuck The Man." When he was young and naïve, he thought The Man was Wall Street. Now he knows that The Man is The Man. The world is full of young Shermans now.
The Italian Fascist salute was with the open hand. Of course, the origins are ancient. The German Nazis copied that from the Italians, along with many other things.
"Do you remember when we used to live in the Village...?"
The instant I read those words I did not think of Bonfire of the Vanities or Nooyawk or Greenwich Village. I thought of that totalitarian paradise where everything is to be had for the asking except the liberty that sets the free man apart from the slaves. I thought of the Village, the gilded cage that held Number Six a prisoner in complete isolation from everything he believed was his by right in his former existence as something more autonomous than a number.
Reading further the true identity of the Village was obvious. However, after a bit of thought, I realized the Village and the Village are the same place, the only difference being whether one needs to be gassed before becoming an inhabitant.
I'll go with #6, Anne, and kudos for you for putting that option in there (duh! gg6, because you agree w/ it?!)...EXCEPT I think the common and sad "delusion" is that too many honestly think what they are doing - IS IS IS - really what they ARE, even though their "heart and soul" would really be better in some other life.....
"...what do rich/well-to-do white people dislike more than anything? Working class Whites! So by helping "poor blacks" they're also hurting ( in an indirect way) their class enemy."
Is that true? Is that really who "rich/well-to-do white people dislike more than anything?" How do you know this, or why do you assume this? Why are poor and working class whites their class enemy but not poor and working class blacks? If they hate the poor and working class, they hate ALL the poor and working class. To the degree the rich purposely help the poor and working class of one particular race and not others, it is intended to divide the poor and working class on the basis of race, undoing the potential of them all joining together into one powerful bloc.
The Italian Fascist salute was with the open hand. Of course, the origins are ancient.
Not necessarily. There's no contemporaneous evidence that what used to be called the Roman Salute was ever used in ancient Rome for any purpose. Its prominence in modern times stems from a once-famous painting, The Oath of the Horatii (1784), by the French neoclassicist artist Jacques-Louis David. David was a Jacobin and the salute likely owes more to the sans-culottes than to the ancient Romans.
The salute was adopted among pan-Italian nationalists in the 19th century as a memento of their fragmented country's glorious past, and subsequently by the Italian Fascists and then the Nazis.
I feel some sympathy for the Hindus and Navajo Indians and Finns, whose beloved swastika symbol was corrupted by the Nazis after millennia of benevolent decorative and spiritual usage in other cultures. I don't think there's any comparable need to mourn the passing of the so-called Roman Salute.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oath_of_the_Horatii
It is nice in the village, until the bubble arrives and covers the face of the prisoner.
In a work of fiction (I assume) I read decades ago, there was a NYC reception for Nancy Reagan(?) in which thousands of butterflies were released into the room to great applause. They promptly flew into the lights and died, falling on the guests.
I thought that was in Bonfire because I can't think of anything else.
I didnt make that connection, I've been watching episodes of secret agent,
Because they need the votes of the poor blacks.
The patterns of power are fully revealed in voting and funding patterns.
The Democratic party has been a high-low mix since the late 1960s at least, if not earlier, and its gotten ever clearer since, their opponents always being the bulk of the middle class. Its why Nixon spoke of his wife having "a respectable Republican cloth coat". It was already so in 1952.
They certainly don't need to "hate" their basis of power. They can despise the black voters, and on the whole they probably do, but they don't fear them, like they do the white middle class masses.
All politics is about who can hurt you.
Which is kind of a prequel to the prisoner with the same actor Patrick mcgoohan.
So easy to be an outcast these days. Sherman McCoy had to do a hit and run. But these days, you can just put on a MAGA hat, (a symbol of the beliefs of half of America) and you are a transgressor. Maybe every Trump supporter should wear a MAGA hat once or twice a year at a select location and at a time when they are braced and ready for assault from liberals and socialists. It's a great chance to truly know what it is to be a member of an outcast group. What does it feel like to be the only black person at a Republican poll watching group? It feels like wearing a MAGA hat to Whole Foods.
"Because they need the votes of the poor blacks."
Yeah, its interesting. When I lived in California full time, I can remember the Prop. 187 vote about illegal immigration. Whites voted - overall - 65-35% for it. Asians-blacks voted for it about 52-48. Even the Hispanic vote for 40-60.
But the two whitest, richest places in the SF Bay area: Marin County and Atherton voted AGAINST Prop. 187. All these rich white people were no doubt giving the "Black Power salute" as they "rebelled" in favor of cheap labor.
This was Obama's successor in the Senate
https://www.google.com/amp/s/chicago.suntimes.com/news/steinberg-kwame-raoul-jason-van-dyke-sentence-laquan-mcdonald-chicago-police-department/amp/
In the big picture:
https://pjmedia.com/michaelledeen/what-does-a-successful-revolution-smell-like/?fbclid=IwAR3EC5Orpm1W95NsPc0hYF2o-ejazEQr8hNOZ6jQLfWMsRx1gedVVgaMe18
Blogger narciso said...
Which is kind of a prequel to the prisoner with the same actor Patrick mcgoohan.
The story of McCabe meets Danger Man. Is Hillary Number 1? or Soros.
On the other hand, we're talking about fiction, so anything goes.
I just finished reading, for the second time, "Days of Rage."
That's not fiction,.
Consider this profile with the latest vapors
https://www.concordia.net/community/samantha-vinograd/
How dare this privileged white man adopt the salute that belongs to black people
The black power salute has always been racist. By having a white person adopt it, Wolfe is saying that it doesn't have to be racist. It can just be a human being making a statement about the unfairness of the world.
he's accused of killing a black person and driving away and not reporting it
That's a major theme in the novel, that his trial became very politicized, precisely because of race. If the driver had been black, or the victim had been a rich white lady, it would have been a non-issue. Black on black crime? Doesn't matter. That's what is so horrific about our race obsessions. When you care so much about race, you don't actually give a damn about people.
Apropos of nothing:
https://www.steynonline.com/9230/the-rain-maker?fbclid=IwAR0vqXk9VHviWvbXAtwIh5FlAFzPfPHA6mcXmAIEjEXhmlmlwRlG7pAeHWk
Been a long time but I think it is mocking Sherman as a wanker. The salute was and is kidding himself.
Raffles, the gentleman thief of old novels, said, ‘We were in Society but not of it’. It's a similar idea to "I was going to work on Wall Street, but my heart and soul would never belong to it."
It seems like one of the few false notes in "Bonfire", or maybe it's just not the direction I wanted it to take.
I am not a huge fan of Tom Wolfe - I am a fan, but not a huge fan, I like the little guy but he lacked intensity.
What am I talking about?
Yes he was fascinated at how people get wrapped up in the 'stories other people tell about themselves" - and in most societies, such stories are not stories of kindness and love, but stories of deep and deprived yearning for comfort and pleasure.
So he got that right but what he got wrong was this
Everybody dies (that is not quite true, several historical saints left this world directly for Heaven, despite what the deluded Dominicans think (that is a reference to their deeply flawed liturgy of August 15 - look it up), and there is a good chance many young people alive today will see the unrolling of the events described in the Book of Revelation, and thereby will see Death, poor sap, defeated ---- but that is not what I am talking about here)) and the Angels of Heaven, and the Saints who never knew death, look at us poor saps who live mortal lives, waking up every day to go to work to take care of people we love or care about ---- or in many cases, to take care of people whom we do not want to spend much time with but whom we consider worth our work time, and our dreary financial sacrifices (financial sacrifices, by the way, are dreary for those who are making the sacrifice, not so dreary for those who are getting the check in the mail or the transfer to their bank account) just because they are human and we do not want them to suffer, we want them to prosper, to be the sort of person someone could like, we want them to be better than they are .....the Angels of Heaven and the Saints who never knew death envy you, my young friends, because of the opportunity you have to be a friend to a creature who never had a friend in this world.
Or something like that,
trust me.
cor ad cor loquitur
"How dare this privileged white man adopt the salute that belongs to black people"
Welp; not only did Black Power appropriate the anti-Fascist salute of the Spanish Republicans; but, Wolfe appropriated his own schtik from 17 years before: Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. I've always found Bonfire to be a fictionalized example of both essays: having laid down the principles, a vicious parody manifesting those themes. Even the name Sherman bespeaks of Mr. Peabody's bespectacled assistant--Man following the Wagging Dog's tail.
Short of putting on the Ochre Robe and taking up the Beggar's Bowl, we are all like Sherman, resisting the Man but going to work with our Golden Handcuffs. It is a shame we never get to see what happens when our hero disappears down the manhole: does he become like Winston Smith praying for the bullet that will set his soul free as he acknowledges that it is his turn to be the sacrificial goat on whose head the High Priest's Lot has fallen?
Anyone who really wants to test being a rebel, put on a Make America Great Again hat and go out into a public place.
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