The American Spectator

Tom Wolfe: I think I have been called conservative because of what I have said about cultural matters. In The Painted Word I didn’t pass critical judgment on anything. But obviously I didn’t take certain holy things very seriously, which I insist is different from saying that something is bad. And then what I wrote about the Black Panthers at Leonard Bernstein’s was taken as a reactionary gesture, but I had no political motive. I just thought it was a scream, because it was so illogical by all ordinary thinking. To think that somebody living in an absolutely stunning duplex on Park Avenue could be having in all these guys who were saying, ‘We will take everything away from you if we get the chance,’ which is what their program spelled out, was the funniest thing I had ever witnessed. /p>

I was openly taking notes, but they just assumed that if I was there for New York magazine it was because I must have approved of what they were doing.

p> TAS: If you were writing for a newspaper today, what would you write about? br> Tom Wolfe: There are a lot of subjects I would cover, such as black middle-class life, which is totally ignored by the press. I would cover religion to keep up with new wave movements, the evangelical movements, and traditional movements within traditional denominations. I would do status articles, which deal with standards set by different groups to demarcate themselves as superior in some fashion. And I would cover stories about other people’s money. At one time I thought ‘Other People’s Money’ would make a good magazine cover. How much are people actually spending? It comes out every now and then in scandals or bankruptcies. But there are lots of ways to get this information. /p>

Balzac was one of the few novelists to get down to dollars and cents. I tried to do that in The Bonfire of the Vanities. But that’s what people want to know. They will eat it up with a spoon.

This article appeared in the December 2004/January 2005 issue of The American Spectator. To subscribe to The American Spectator, click here.