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As I mentioned previously, I spent most of Friday and Saturday in Athens at the annual continuing legal education seminar on estate planning. Because there are periodic breaks between sessions at this event, I generally take a book with me, so that I will have something to read while waiting for the next session to begin.
This morning, I happened to have handy Tom Wolfe's Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. "Radical Chic" is the term Wolfe used to describe a pattern that emerged among New York culturati and leftist intellectuals in the late 1960s, when such figures as Leonard Bernstein became enraptured by young militants like the Black Panthers and began hosting fundraising parties to bring high society and urban guerrillas together.
Wolfe has a unique talent for combining journalism, raconteurism, humor, irony, and sociology, all bundled together and bound by the author's unwillingness to suffer hypocrites gladly. In the phrase "Radical Chic," he ably captures the spirit of a time when it became fashionable for those in certain circles to give themselves the artificial thrill of false relevance by presuming to speak authoritatively about matters of which they were utterly ignorant, with embarrassing and unintentionally comedic results as their haughtiness soon was revealed to be silly and infantile.
How is this relevant to college football, you may ask?
While I was perusing Wolfe's critique of '60s left-wing intellectuals in New York City, I was reminded of Heismanpundit's infamous "Gang of Six" theory. Suddenly, the realization hit me.
The correct term for Heismanpundit's hypothesis isn't "Gang of Six" . . . it's "Offensive Chic."
Go 'Dawgs! |
| | Posted 2/11/2006 9:02 PM - 293 Views - 2 eProps - 3 comments
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