tom wolfe me decade essay

The ‘Me’ Decade

The new alchemical dream is: changing one’s personality—remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing one’s very self..

Editor’s note: This story first appeared in the August 23, 1976, issue of New York . It was also featured in Reread , New York’s subscriber-only archives newsletter. Click here to read the newsletter this appeared in.

I. Me and My Hemorrhoids

The trainer said, “Take your finger off the repress button.” Everybody was supposed to let go, let all the vile stuff come up and gush out. They even provided vomit bags, like the ones on a 747, in case you literally let it gush out! Then the trainer told everybody to think of “the one thing you would most like to eliminate from your life.” And so what does our girl blurt over the microphone?

“Hemorrhoids!”

That was how she ended up in her present state … stretched out on the wall-to-wall carpet of the banquet hall of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles with her eyes closed and her face pressed into the stubble of the carpet, which is a thick commercial weave and feels like clothes-brush bristles against her face and smells a bit high from cleaning solvent. That was how she ended up lying here concentrating on her hemorrhoids.

Eyes shut! deep in her own space! her hemorrhoids! the grisly peanut—

Many others are stretched out on the carpet all around her; some 249 other souls, in fact. They’re all strewn across the floor of the banquet hall with their eyes closed, just as she is. But Christ, the others are concentrating on things that sound serious and deep when you talk about them. And how they had talked about them! They had all marched right up to the microphone and “shared,” as the trainer called it. What did they want to eliminate from their lives? Why, they took their fingers right off the old repress button and told the whole room. My husband! my wife! my homosexuality! my inability to communicate, my self-hatred, self-destructiveness, craven fears, puling weaknesses, primordial horrors, premature ejaculation, impotence, frigidity, rigidity, subservience, laziness, alcoholism, major vices, minor vices, grim habits, twisted psyches, tortured souls—and then it had been her turn, and she had said, “Hemorrhoids.”

You can imagine what that sounded like. That broke the place up. The trainer looked like a cocky little bastard up there on the podium with his deep tan, white tennis shirt, and peach-colored sweater, a dynamite color combination, all very casual and spontaneous—after about two hours of trying on different outfits in front of a mirror, that kind of casual and spontaneous, if her guess was right. And yet she found him attractive. Commanding was the word. He probably wondered if she were playing the wiseacre, with her “hemorrhoids,” but he rolled with it. Maybe she was being playful. Just looking at him made her feel mischievous. In any event, hemorrhoids was what had bubbled up into her brain.

Then the trainer had told them to stack their folding chairs in the back of the banquet hall and lie down on the floor and close their eyes and get deep into their own spaces and concentrate on that one item they wanted to get rid of the most—and really feel it and let the feeling gush out.

So now she’s lying here concentrating on her hemorrhoids. The strange thing is … it’s no joke after all! She begins to feel her hemorrhoids in all their morbid presence. She can actually feel them. The sieges always began with her having the sensation that a peanut was caught in her anal sphincter. That meant a section of swollen varicose vein had pushed its way out of her intestines and was actually coming out of her bottom. It was as hard as a peanut and felt bigger and grislier than a peanut. Well—for God’s sake!—in her daily life, even at work, especially at work, and she works for a movie distributor, her whole picture of herself was of her … seductive physical presence. She was not the most successful businesswoman in Los Angeles, but she was certainly successful enough, and quite in addition to that, she was … the main sexual presence in the office. When she walked into the office each morning, everyone, women as well as men, checked her out. She knew that. She could feel her sexual presence go through the place like an invisible chemical, like a hormone, a scent, a universal solvent.

The most beautiful moments came when she would be in her office or in a conference room or at Mr. Chow’s taking a meeting—nobody “had” meetings anymore, they “took” them—with two or three men, men she had never met before or barely knew. The overt subject was, inevitably, eternally, “the deal.” She always said there should be only one credit line up on the screen for any movie: “Deal by… .” But the meeting would also have a subplot. The overt plot would be “The Deal.” The subplot would be “The Men Get Turned On by Me.” Pretty soon, even though the conversation had not strayed overtly from “The Deal,” the men would be swaying in unison like dune grass at the beach. And she was the wind, of course. And then one of the men would say something and smile and at the same time reach over and touch her … on top of the hand or on the side of the arm … as if it meant nothing … as if it were just a gesture for emphasis … but in fact a man is usually deathly afraid of reaching out and touching a woman he doesn’t know … and she knew it meant she had hypnotized him sexually… .

Well—for God’s sake!—at just that sublime moment, likely as not, the goddam peanut would be popping out of her tail! As she smiled sublimely at her conquest, she also had to sit in her chair lopsided, with one cheek of her buttocks higher than the other, as if she were about to crepitate, because it hurt to sit squarely on the peanut. If for any reason she had to stand up at that point and walk, she would have to walk as if her hip joints were rusted out, as if she were 65 years old, because a normal stride pressed the peanut, and the pain would start up, and the bleeding, too, very likely. Or if she couldn’t get up and had to sit there for a while and keep her smile and her hot hormonal squinted eyes pinned on the men before her, the peanut would start itching or burning, and she would start double-tracking, as if her mind were a tape deck with two channels going at once. In one she’s the sexual princess, the Circe, taking a meeting and clouding men’s minds … and in the other she’s a poor bitch who wants nothing more in this world than to go down the corridor to the ladies’ room and get some Kleenex and some Vaseline and push the peanut back up into her intestines with her finger.

And even if she’s able to get away and do that, she will spend the rest of that day and the next, and the next, with a deep worry in the back of her brain, the sort of worry that always stays on the edge of your consciousness, no matter how hard you think of something else. She will be wondering at all times what the next bowel movement will be like, how solid and compact the bolus will be, trying to think back and remember if she’s had any milk, cream, chocolate, or any other binding substance in the last 24 hours, or any nuts or fibrous vegetables like broccoli. Is she really in for it this time—

The Sexual Princess! On the outside she has on her fireproof grin and her Fiorio scarf as if to say she lives in a world of Sevilles and 450SL’s and dinner last night at Dominick’s, a movie-business restaurant on Beverly Boulevard that’s so exclusive, Dominick keeps his neon sign (DOMINICK’S) turned off to make the wimps think it’s closed, but she (Hi, Dominick!) can get a table—but inside her it’s all the battle between the bolus and the peanut—

—and is it too late to leave the office and go get some mineral oil and let some of that vile glop roll down her gullet or get a refill on the softener tablets or eat some prunes or drink some coffee or do something else to avoid one of those horrible hard-clay boluses that will come grinding out of her, crushing the peanut and starting not only the bleeding but … the pain! … a horrible humiliating pain that feels like she’s getting a paper cut in her anus, like the pain you feel when the edge of a piece of bond paper slices your finger, plus a horrible hellish purple bloody varicose pressure, but lasting not for an instant, like a paper cut, but for an eternity, prolonged until the tears are rolling down her face as she sits in the cubicle, and she wants to cry out, to scream until it’s over, to make the screams of fear, fury, and humiliation obliterate the pain. But someone would hear! No doubt they’d come bursting right into the ladies’ room to save her! and feed their morbid curiosities! And what could she possibly say? And so she had simply held that feeling in all these years, with her eyes on fire and her entire pelvic saddle a great purple tub of pain. She had repressed the whole squalid horror of it— the searing peanut—

—until now. The trainer had said, “Take your finger off the repress button!” Let it gush up and pour out!

And now, as she lies here on the floor of the banquet hall of the Ambassador Hotel with 249 other souls, she knows exactly what he meant. She can feel it all, all of the pain, and on top of the pain all the humiliation, and for the first time in her life she has permission from the Management, from herself, and from everyone around her to let the feeling gush forth. So she starts moaning.

“Ooooooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhh!”

And when she starts moaning, the most incredible and exhilarating thing begins to happen. A wave of moans spreads through the people lying around her, as if her energy were radiating out like a radar pulse.

So she lets her moan rise into a keening sound.

“Oooooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhheeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!”

And when she begins to keen, the souls near her begin keening, even while the moans are still spreading to the prostrate folks farther from her, on the edges of the room.

“Eeeeeeeeeooooooohhhhhhhhheeeeeooooooooh!”

So she lets her keening sound rise up into a real scream.

“Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiai!”

And this rolls out in a wave, too, first through those near her, and then toward the far edges.

“Aiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaieeeeeeeeeeeeeeohhhhhhhhhheeeeeeaiaiai!”

And so she turns it all the way up, into a scream such as she has never allowed herself in her entire life.

“AiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaaaaAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHH!”

And her full scream spreads from soul to soul, over top of the keens and fading moans . . .

“AAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGHHHaiaiaiaieeeeeeeeeooooohhheeeeaiaiaiaiaiaiaaaaAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRGGGGHHHHHH!”

…until at last the entire room is consumed in her scream, as if there are no longer 250 separate souls but one noosphere of souls united in some incorporeal way by her scream. . .

“AAAAAAAAAAARGGGGGGGGHHHHHH!”

Which is not simply her scream any longer … but the world’s! Each soul is concentrated on its own burning item … my husband! my wife! my homosexuality! my inability to communicate, my self-hatred, self-destruction, craven fears, puling weaknesses, primordial horrors, premature ejaculation, impotence, frigidity, rigidity, subservience, laziness, alcoholism, major vices, minor vices, grim habits, twisted psyches, tortured souls—and yet each unique item has been raised to a cosmic level and united with every other until there is but one piercing moment of release and liberation at last—a whole world of anguish set free by . . .

My hemorrhoids.

“Me and My Hemorrhoids Star at the Ambassador” … during a three-day Erhard Seminars Training (est) course in the hotel banquet hall. The truly odd part, however, is yet to come. In her experience lies the explanation of certain grand puzzles of the 1970s, a period that will come to be known as the Me Decade.

II. The Holy Roll

In 1972 a farsighted caricaturist did a drawing of Teddy Kennedy captioned “President Kennedy campaigning for re-election in 1980 … courting the so-called Awakened vote.”

The picture shows Kennedy ostentatiously wearing not only a crucifix but also (if one looks just above the cross) a pendant of the Bleeding Heart of Jesus. The crucifix is the symbol of Christianity in general, but the Bleeding Heart is the symbol of some of Christianity’s most ecstatic, nonrational, holy-rolling cults. I should point out that the artist’s prediction lacked certain refinements. For one thing, Kennedy may be campaigning to be president in 1980, but he is not terribly likely to be the incumbent. For another, the odd spectacle of politicians using ecstatic, nonrational, holy-rolling religion in presidential campaigning was to appear first not in 1980 but in 1976.

The two most popular new figures in the 1976 campaign, Jimmy Carter and Jerry Brown, are men who rose up from state politics … absolutely aglow with mystical religious streaks. Carter turned out to be an evangelical Baptist who had recently been “born again” and “saved,” who had “accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Savior”—i.e., he was of the Missionary lectern-pounding amen ten-finger C-major-chord Sister-Martha-at-the-Yamaha-keyboard loblolly piny-woods Baptist faith in which the members of the congregation stand up and “give witness” and “share it. Brother” and “share it, Sister” and “Praise God!” during the service. Jerry Brown turned out to be the Zen Jesuit, a former Jesuit seminarian who went about like a hair-shirt Catholic monk, but one who happened to believe also in the Gautama Buddha, and who got off koans in an offhand but confident manner, even on political issues, as to how it is not the right answer that matters but the right question, and so forth.

Newspaper columnists and newsmagazine writers continually referred to the two men’s “enigmatic appeal.” Which is to say, they couldn’t explain it. Nevertheless, they tried. They theorized that the war in Vietnam, Watergate, the FBI and CIA scandals, had left the electorate shell-shocked and disillusioned and that in their despair the citizens were groping no longer for specific remedies but for sheer faith, something, anything (even holy rolling), to believe in. This was in keeping with the current fashion of interpreting all new political phenomena in terms of recent disasters, frustration, protest, the decline of civilization … the Grim Slide. But when the New York Times and CBS employed a polling organization to try to find out just what great gusher of “frustration” and “protest” Carter had hit, the results were baffling. A Harvard political scientist, William Schneider, concluded for the L.A. Times that “the Carter protest” was a new kind of protest, “a protest of good feelings.” That was a new kind, sure enough—a protest that wasn’t a protest.

In fact, both Carter and Brown had stumbled upon a fabulous terrain for which there are no words in current political language. A couple of politicians had finally wandered into the Me Decade.

III. Him? — The New Man?

The saga of the Me Decade begins with one of those facts that is so big and so obvious (like the Big Dipper), no one ever comments on it anymore. Namely: the 30-year boom. Wartime spending in the United States in the 1940s touched off a boom that has continued for more than 30 years. It has pumped money into every class level of the population on a scale without parallel in any country in history. True, nothing has solved the plight of those at the very bottom, the chronically unemployed of the slums. Nevertheless, in Compton, California, today it is possible for a family at the very lowest class level, which is known in America today as “on welfare,” to draw an income of $8,000 a year entirely from public sources. This is more than most British newspaper columnists and Italian factory foremen make, even allowing for differences in living costs. In America truck drivers, mechanics, factory workers, policemen, firemen, and garbagemen make so much money—$15,000 to $20,000 (or more) per year is not uncommon—that the word proletarian can no longer be used in this country with a straight face. So one now says lower middle class. One can’t even call workingmen blue collar any longer. They all have on collars like Joe Namath’s or Johnny Bench’s or Walt Frazier’s. They all have on $35 Superstar Qiana sport shirts with elephant collars and 1940s Airbrush Wallpaper Flowers Buncha Grapes and Seashell designs all over them.

Well, my God, the old utopian socialists of the nineteenth century—such as Saint-Simon, Owen, Fourier, and Marx— lived for the day of the liberated workingman. They foresaw a day when industrialism (Saint-Simon coined the word) would give the common man the things he needed in order to realize his potential as a human being: surplus (discretionary) income, political freedom, free time (leisure), and freedom from grinding drudgery. Some of them, notably Owen and Fourier, thought all this might come to pass first in the United States. So they set up communes here: Owen’s New Harmony commune in Indiana and 34 Fourier-style “phalanx” settlements—socialist communes, because the new freedom was supposed to be possible only under socialism. The old boys never dreamed that the new freedom would come to pass instead as the result of a Go-Getter Bourgeois business boom such as began in the United States in the 1940s. Nor would they have liked it if they had seen it. For one thing, the homo novus , the new man, the liberated man, the first common man in the history of the world with the much-dreamed-of combination of money, free time, and personal freedom—this American workingman didn’t look right. The Joe Namath-Johnny Bench—Walt Frazier-Superstar Qiana Wallpaper sport shirt, for a start.

He didn’t look right, and he wouldn’t … do right! I can remember what brave plans visionary architects at Yale and Harvard still had for the common man in the early 1950s. (They actually used the term “common man.”) They had brought the utopian socialist dream forward into the twentieth century. They had things figured out for the workingman down to truly minute details such as lamp switches. The new liberated workingman would live as the Cultivated Ascetic. He would be modeled on the B.A.-degree Greenwich Village bohemian of the late 1940s—dark wool Hudson Bay shirts, tweed jackets, flannel trousers, briarwood pipes, good books, sandals and simplicity—except that he would live in a Worker Housing project. All Yale and Harvard architects worshiped Bauhaus principles and had the Bauhaus vision of Worker Housing. The Bauhaus movement absolutely hypnotized American architects, once its leaders, such as Walter Gropius and Ludwig Miës van der Rohe, came to the United States from Germany in the 1930s. Worker Housing in America would have pure beige rooms, stripped, freed, purged of all moldings, cornices, and overhangs—which Gropius regarded as symbolic “crowns” and therefore loathsome. Worker Housing would be liberated from all wallpaper, “drapes,” Wilton rugs with flowers on them, lamps with fringed shades and bases that looked like vases or Greek columns. It would be cleansed of all doilies, knickknacks, mantelpieces, headboards, and radiator covers. Radiator coils would be left bare as honest, abstract sculptural objects.

But somehow the workers, incurable slobs that they were, avoided Worker Housing, better known as “the projects,” as if it had a smell. They were heading out instead to the suburbs—the suburbs! —to places like Islip, Long Island, and the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles—and buying houses with clapboard siding and a high-pitched roof and shingles and gaslight-style front-porch lamps and mailboxes set up on top of lengths of stiffened chain that seemed to defy gravity and all sorts of other unbelievably cute or antiquey touches, and they loaded these houses up with “drapes” such as baffled all description and wall-to-wall carpet you could lose a shoe in, and they put barbecue pits and fish ponds with concrete cherubs urinating into them on the lawn out back, and they parked 25-foot-long cars out front and Evinrude cruisers up on tow trailers in the carport just beyond the breezeway.

By the 1960s the common man was also getting quite interested in this business of “realizing his potential as a human being.” But once again he crossed everybody up! Once more he took his money and ran—determined to do-it-himself!

IV. Lemon Sessions

In 1971 I made a lecture tour of Italy, talking (at the request of my Italian hosts) about “contemporary American life.” Everywhere I went, from Turin to Palermo, Italian students were interested in just one question: Was it really true that young people in America, no older than themselves, actually left home, and lived communally according to their own rules and created their own dress styles and vocabulary and had free sex and took dope? They were talking, of course, about the hippie or psychedelic movement that had begun flowering about 1965. What fascinated them the most, however, was the first item on the list: that the hippies actually left home and lived communally according to their own rules.

To Italian students this seemed positively amazing. Several of the students I met lived wild enough lives during daylight hours. They were in radical organizations and had fought pitched battles with police, on the barricades, as it were. But by 8:30 P.M. they were back home, obediently washing their hands before dinner with Mom&Dad&Buddy&Sis&theMaidenAunt. Their counterparts in America, the New Left students of the late sixties, lived in communes that were much like the hippies’, except that the costumery tended to be semimilitary: the noncom officers’ shirts, combat boots, commando berets—worn in combination with blue jeans or a turtleneck jersey, however, to show that one was not a uniform freak.

That people so young could go off on their own, without taking jobs, and live a life completely of their own design—to Europeans it was astounding. That ordinary factory workers could go off to the suburbs and buy homes and create their own dream houses—this, too, was astounding. And yet the new life of old people in America in the 1960s was still more astounding. Throughout European history and in the United States up to the Second World War, old age was a time when you had to cling to your children or other kinfolk, and to their sufferance and mercy, if any. The Old Folks at Home happily mingling in the old manse with the generations that followed? The little ones learning at grandpa’s and grandma’s bony knees? These are largely the myths of nostalgia. The beloved old folks were often exiled to the attic or the outbuildings, and the servants brought them their meals. They were not considered decorative in the dining room or the parlor.

In the 1960s, old people in America began doing something that was more extraordinary than it ever seemed at the time. They cut through the whole dreary humiliation of old age by heading off to “retirement villages” and “leisure developments”—which quickly became Old Folks communes. Some of the old parties managed to take this to a somewhat psychedelic extreme, joining trailer caravans … and rolling … creating some of the most amazing sights of the modern American landscape … such as 30, 40, 50 Airstream trailers, the ones that are silver and have rounded corners and ends and look like silver bullets … 30, 40, 50 of these silver bullets in a line, in a caravan, hauling down the highway in the late afternoon with the sun at a low angle and exploding off the silver surfaces of the Airstreams until the whole convoy looks like some gigantic and improbable string of jewelry, each jewel ablaze with a highlight, rolling over the face of the earth—the million-volt billion-horsepower bijoux of America! The Trailer Sailors!

Ignored or else held in contempt by working people, Bauhaus design eventually triumphed as a symbol of wealth and privilege, attuned chiefly to the tastes of businessmen’s wives. For example, Miës’s most famous piece of furniture design, the Barcelona chair, now sells for $1.680 and is available only through one’s decorator. The high price is due in no small part to the chair’s Worker Housing Honest Materials: stainless steel and leather. No chromed iron is allowed, and customers are refused if they want to have the chair upholstered in material of their own choice. Only leather is allowed, and only six shades of that: Seagram’s Building Lobby Palomino, Monsanto Company Lobby Antelope, Architectural Digest Pecan, Transamerica Building Ebony, Bank of America Building Walnut, and Embarcadero Center Mink.

It was remarkable enough that ordinary folks now had enough money to take it and run off and alter the circumstances of their lives and create new roles for themselves, such as Trailer Sailor or Gerontoid Cowboy. But, simultaneously, still others decided to go … all the way. They plunged straight toward what has become the alchemical dream of the Me Decade.

The old alchemical dream was changing base metals into gold. The new alchemical dream is: changing one’s personality—remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing one’s very self … and observing, studying, and doting on it. (Me!) This had always been an aristocratic luxury, confined throughout most of history to the life of the courts, since only the very wealthiest classes had the free time and the surplus income to dwell upon this sweetest and vainest of pastimes. It smacked so much of vanity, in fact, that the noble folk involved in it always took care to call it quite something else.

Much of the satisfaction well-born people got from what is known historically as the “chivalric tradition” was precisely that: dwelling upon Me and every delicious nuance of my conduct and personality. At Versailles, Louis XIV founded a school for the daughters of impoverished noblemen, called L’Ecole Saint-Cyr. At the time most schools for girls were in convents. Louis had quite something else in mind, a secular school that would develop womenfolk suitable for the superior race guerrière that he believed himself to be creating in France. Saint-Cyr was the forerunner of what was known up until a few years ago as the finishing school . And what was the finishing school? Why, a school in which the personality was to be shaped and buffed like a piece of high-class psychological cabinetry. For centuries most of upper-class college education in France and England has been fashioned in the same manner: with an eye toward sculpting the personality as carefully as the intellectual faculties.

At Yale the students on the outside wondered for 80 years what went on inside the fabled secret senior societies, such as Skull and Bones. On Thursday nights one would see the secret-society members walking silently and single file, in black flannel suits, white shirts, and black knit ties with gold pins on them, toward their great Greek Revival temples on the campus, buildings whose mystery was doubled by the fact that they had no windows. What in the name of God or Mammon went on in those 30-odd Thursday nights during the senior years of these happy few? What went on was … lemon sessions! —a regularly scheduled series of lemon sessions, just like the ones that occurred informally in girls’ finishing schools.

In the girls’ schools these lemon sessions tended to take place at random on nights when a dozen or so girls might end up in someone’s dormitory room. One girl would become “it,” and the others would light into her personality, pulling it to pieces to analyze every defect … her spitefulness, her awkwardness, her bad breath, embarrassing clothes, ridiculous laugh, her suck-up fawning, latent lesbianism, or whatever. The poor creature might be reduced to tears. She might blurt out the most terrible confessions, hatreds, and primordial fears. But, it was presumed, she would be the stronger for it afterward. She would be on her way toward a new personality. Likewise, in the secret societies: They held lemon sessions for boys. Is masturbation your problem? Out with the truth, you ridiculous weenie! And Thursday night after Thursday night the awful truths would out, as he who was It stood up before them and answered the most horrible questions. Yes! I do it! I whack whack whack it! I’m afraid of women! I’m afraid of you! And I get my shirts at Rosenberg’s instead of Press! (Oh, you dreary turkey, you wet smack, you little shit!) … But out of the fire and the heap of ashes would come a better man, a brother, of good blood and good bone, for the American race guerrière. And what was more … they loved it. No matter how dreary the soap opera, the star was Me.

By the mid-1960s this service, this luxury, had become available for one and all, i.e., the middle classes. Lemon Session Central was the Esalen Institute, a lodge perched on a cliff over-looking the Pacific in Big Sur, California, Esalen’s specialty was lube jobs for the personality. Businessmen, businesswomen, housewives—anyone who could afford it, and by now many could—paid $220 a week to come to Esalen to learn about themselves and loosen themselves up and wiggle their fannies a bit, in keeping with methods developed by William C. Schutz and Frederick Perls. Fritz Perls, as he was known, was a remarkable figure, a psychologist who had a gray beard and went about in a blue terry-cloth jump suit and looked like a great blue grizzled father bear. His lemon sessions sprang not out of the manly virtues and cold showers Protestant-prep-school tradition of Yale but out of psychoanalysis. His sessions were a variety of the “marathon encounter.” He put the various candidates for personality change in groups, and they met in close quarters day after day. They were encouraged to bare their own souls and to strip away one another’s defensive facades. Everyone was to face his own emotions squarely for the first time.

Encounter sessions, particularly of the Schutz variety, were often wild events. Such aggression! such sobs! tears! moans, hysteria, vile recriminations, shocking revelations, such explosions of hostility between husbands and wives, such mud balls of profanity from previously mousy mommies and workadaddies, such red-mad attacks! Only physical assault was prohibited. The encounter session became a standard approach in many other movements, such as Scientology, Arica, the Mel Lyman movement, Synanon, Daytop Village, and Primal Scream. Synanon had started out as a drug rehabilitation program, but by the late 1960s the organization was recruiting “lay members,” a lay member being someone who had never been addicted to heroin … but was ready for the lemon-session life.

Outsiders, hearing of these sessions, wondered what on earth their appeal was. Yet the appeal was simple enough. It is summed up in the notion: “Let’s talk about Me. ” No matter whether you managed to renovate your personality through encounter sessions or not, you had finally focused your attention and your energies on the most fascinating subject on earth: Me. Not only that, you also put Me up on stage before a live audience. The popular “est” movement has managed to do that with great refinement. Just imagine … Me and My Hemorrhoids … moving an entire hall to the most profound outpouring of emotion! Just imagine … my life becoming a drama with universal significance … analyzed, like Hamlet’s, for what it signifies for the rest of mankind… .

The encounter session—although it was not called that—was also a staple practice in psychedelic communes and, for that matter, in New Left communes. In fact, the analysis of the self, and of one another, was unceasing. But in these groups and at Esalen and in movements such as Arica there were two common assumptions that distinguished them from the aristocratic lemon sessions and personality finishings of yore. The first was: I, with the help of my brothers and sisters, must strip away all the shams and excess baggage of society and my upbringing in order to find the Real Me. Scientology uses the word “clear” to identify the state that one must strive for. But just what is that state? And what will the Real Me be like? It is at this point that the new movements tend to take on a religious or spiritual atmosphere. In one form or another they arrive at an axiom first propounded by the Gnostic Christians some 1,800 years ago: namely, that at the apex of every human soul there exists a spark of the light of God. In most mortals that spark is “asleep” (the Gnostics’ word), all but smothered by the facades and general falseness of society. But those souls who are clear can find that spark within themselves and unite their souls with God’s. And with that conviction comes the second assumption: There is an other order that actually reigns supreme in the world. Like the light of God itself, this other order is invisible to most mortals. But he who has dug himself out from under the junk heap of civilization can discover it.

And with that … the Me movements were about to turn righteous.

V. Young Faith, Aging Groupies

By the early 1970s so many of the Me movements had reached this Gnostic religious stage, they now amounted to a new religious wave. Synanon, Arica, and the Scientology movement had become religions. The much-publicized psychedelic or hipple communes of the 1960s, although no longer big items in the press, were spreading widely and becoming more and more frankly religious. The huge Steve Gaskin commune in the Tennessee scrublands was a prime example. A New York Times survey concluded that there were at least two thousand communes in the United States by 1970, barely five years after the idea first caught on in California. Both the Esalen-style and Primal Therapy or Primal Scream encounter movements were becoming progressively less psychoanalytical and more mystical in their approach. The Oriental “meditation” religions—which had existed in the United States mainly in the form of rather intellectual and bohemian Zen and yoga circles—experienced a spectacular boom. Groups such as the Hare Krishna, the Sufi, and the Maharaj Ji communes began to discover that they could enroll thousands of new members and (in some cases) make small fortunes in real estate to finance the expansion. Many members of the New Left communes of the 1960s began to turn up in Me movements in the 1970s, including two of the celebrated “Chicago Seven.” Rennie Davis became a follower of the Maharaj Ji. Jerry Rubin enrolled in both est and Arica. Barbara Garson, who with the help of her husband, Marvin, wrote the great agitprop drama of the New Left, MacBird, would later observe, with considerable bitterness: “My husband Marvin forsook everything (me included) to find peace. For three years he wandered without shoes or money or glasses. Now he is in Israel with some glasses and possibly with some peace.” And not just him, she said, but so many other New Lefters as well: “Some follow a guru, some are into Primal Scream, some seek a rest from the diaspora—a home in Zion.” It is entirely possible that in the long run historians will regard the entire New Left experience as not so much a political as a religious episode wrapped in semi military gear and guerrilla talk.

Meanwhile the ESP or “psychic phenomena” movement began to grow very rapidly in the new religious atmosphere, ESP devotees had always believed that there was an other order that ran the universe, one that revealed itself occasionally through telepathy, déjà vu experiences, psychokinesis, dematerialization, and the like. It was but a small step from there to the assumption that all men possess a conscious energy paralleling the world of physical energy and that this mysterious energy can unite the universe (after the fashion of the light of God). A former astronaut, Edgar Mitchell, who has a doctor-of-science degree from MIT, founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences in an attempt to channel the work of all the ESP groups. “Noetic” is an adjective derived from the same root as that of “the Noosphere”—the name that Teilhard de Chardin gave his dream of a cosmic union of all souls. Even the Flying Saucer cults began to reveal their essentially religious nature at about this time. The Flying Saucer folk quite literally believed in an other order : It was under the command of superior beings from other planets or solar systems who had spaceships. A physician named Andrija Puharich wrote a book ( Uri ) in which he published the name of the God of the UFO’s: Hoova. He said Hoova had a herald messenger named Spectra, and Hoova’s and Spectra’s agent on earth, the human connection, as it were, was Uri Geller, the famous Israeli psychic and showman. Geller’s powers were also of great interest to people in the ESP movement, and there were many who wished that Puharich and the UFO people would keep their hands off him.

By the early 1970s a quite surprising movement, tagged as the Jesus People, had spread throughout the country. At the outset practically all the Jesus People were young acid heads, i.e., LSD users, who had sworn off drugs (except, occasionally, in “organic form,” meaning marijuana and peyote) but still wanted the ecstatic spiritualism of the psychedelic or hippie life. This they found in Fundamentalist evangelical holy-rolling Christianity of a sort that ten years before would have seemed utterly impossible to revive in America. The Jesus People, such as the Children of God, the Fresno God Squad, the Tony and Susan Alamo Christian Foundation, the Sun Myung Moon sect, lived communally and took an ecstatic or “charismatic” (literally: “God-imbued”) approach to Christianity, after the manner of the Oneida, Shaker, and Mormon communes of the nineteenth century … and, for the matter, after the manner of the early Christians themselves, including the Gnostics.

There was considerable irony here. Ever since the late 1950s both the Catholic Church and the leading Protestant denominations had been aware that young people, particularly in the cities, were drifting away from the faith. At every church conference and convocation and finance-committee meeting the cry went up: We must reach the urban young people. It became an obsession, this business of “the urban young people.” The key—one and all decided—was to “modernize” and “update” Christianity. So the Catholics gave the nuns outfits that made them look like World War II Wacs. The Protestants set up “beatnik coffee-houses” in church basements for poetry reading and bongo playing. They had the preacher put on a turtleneck sweater and sing “Joe Hill” and “Frankie and Johnny” during the hootenanny at the Sunday vespers. Both the priests and the preachers carried placards in civil rights marches, gay rights marches, women’s rights marches, prisoners’ rights marches, bondage lovers’ rights marches, or any other marches, so long as they might appear hip to the urban young people.

In fact, all these strenuous gestures merely made the churches look like rather awkward and senile groupies of secular movements. The much-sought-after Urban Young People found the Hip Churchman to be an embarrassment, if they noticed him at all. What finally started attracting young people to Christianity was something the churches had absolutely nothing to do with: namely, the psychedelic or hippie movement. The hippies had suddenly made religion look hip. Very few people went into the hippie life with religious intentions, but many came out of it absolutely righteous. The sheer power of the drug LSD is not to be underestimated. It was quite easy for an LSD experience to take the form of a religious vision, particularly if one were among people already so inclined. You would come across someone you had known for years, a pal, only now he was jacked up on LSD and sitting in the middle of the street saying. “I’m in the Pudding at last! I’ve met the Manager!” Without knowing it, many heads were reliving the religious fervor of their grandparents or great-grandparents … the Bible-Belting lectern-pounding amen ten-finger C-majorchord Sister-Martha-at-the-keyboard tent-meeting loblolly piny-woods share-it-brother believers of the nineteenth century. The hippies were religious and incontrovertibly hip at the same time.

Today it is precisely the most rational, intellectual, secularized, modernized, updated, relevant religions—all the brave, forward-looking Ethical Culture, Unitarian, and Swedenborgian movements of only yesterday—that are finished, gasping, breathing their last. What the Urban Young People want from religion is a little Hallelujah! … and talking in tongues! … Praise God! Precisely that! In the most prestigious divinity schools today, Catholic. Presbyterian, and Episcopal, the avant-garde movement, the leading edge, is “charismatic Christianity” … featuring talking in tongues, ululation, visions, holy rolling, and other nonrational, even antirational, practices. Some of the most respectable old-line Protestant congregations, in the most placid suburban settings, have begun to split into the Charismatics and the Easter Christians (“All they care about is being seen in church on Easter”). The Easter Christians still usually control the main Sunday-morning service—but the Charismatics take over on Sunday evening and do the holy roll.

This curious development has breathed new life into the existing Fundamentalists, theosophists, and older salvation seekers of all sorts. Ten years ago, if anyone of wealth, power, or renown had publicly “announced for Christ,” people would have looked at him as if his nose had been eaten away by weevils. Today it happens regularly … Harold Hughes resigns from the U.S. Senate to become an evangelist … Jim Irwin, the astronaut, teams up with a Baptist evangelist in an organization called High Flight … singers like Pat Boone and Anita Bryant announce for Jesus … Charles Colson, the former hardballer of the Nixon administration, announces for Jesus, and the man who is likely to be the next president of the United States, Jimmy Carter, announces for Jesus. Oh Jesus People.

VI. Only One Life

In 1961 a copywriter named Shirley Polykoff was working for the Foote, Cone & Belding advertising agency on the Clairol hair-dye account when she came up with the line: “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a blonde!” In a single slogan she had summed up what might be described as the secular side of the Me Decade. “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a—!” (You have only to fill in the blank.)

This formula accounts for much of the popularity of the women’s-liberation or feminist movement. “What does a woman want?” said Freud. Perhaps there are women who want to humble men or reduce their power or achieve equality or even superiority for themselves and their sisters. But for every one such woman, there are nine who simply want to fill in the blank as they see fit. “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as … a free spirit!” (Instead of … a house slave: a cleaning woman, a cook, a nursemaid, a station-wagon hacker, and an occasional household sex aid.) But even that may be overstating it, because often the unconscious desire is nothing more than: Let’s talk about Me. The great unexpected dividend of the feminist movement has been to elevate an ordinary status—woman, housewife—to the level of drama. One’s very existence as a woman —as Me —becomes something all the world analyzes, agonizes over, draws cosmic conclusions from, or, in any event, takes seriously. Every woman becomes Emma Bovary, Cousin Bette, or Nora … or Erica Jong or Consuelo Saah Baehr.

Among men the formula becomes: “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a … Casanova or a Henry VIII” … instead of a humdrum workadaddy, eternally faithful, except perhaps for a mean little skulking episode here and there, to a woman who now looks old enough to be your aunt and has atrophied calves, and is an embarrassment to be seen with when you take her on trips. The right to shuck overripe wives and take on fresh ones was once seen as the prerogative of kings only, and even then it was scandalous. In the 1950s and 1960s it began to be seen as the prerogative of the rich, the powerful, and the celebrated (Nelson Rockefeller, Henry Ford, and show-business figures), although it retained the odor of scandal. Wife-shucking damaged Adlai Stevenson’s chances of becoming president in 1952 and Rockefeller’s chances of becoming the Republican presidential nominee in 1964 and 1968. Until the 1970s, wife-shucking made it impossible for an astronaut to be chosen to go into space. Today, in the Me Decade, it becomes normal behavior, one of the factors that have pushed the divorce rate above 50 percent.

When Eugene McCarthy filled in the blank in 1972 and shucked his wife, it was hardly noticed. Likewise in the case of several astronauts. When Wayne Hays filled in the blank in 1976 and shucked his wife of 38 years, it did not hurt his career in the slightest, although copulating with the girl in the office was still regarded as scandalous. (Elizabeth Ray filled in the blank in another popular fashion: “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a … Celebrity!” As did Arthur Bremer, who kept a diary during his stalking of Nixon and, later, George Wallace … with an eye toward the book contract. Which he got.) Some wiseacre has remarked, supposedly with levity, that the federal government may in time have to create reservations for women over 35, to take care of the swarms of shucked wives and widows. In fact, women in precisely those categories have begun setting up communes or “extended families” to provide one another support and companionship in a world without workadaddies. (“If I’ve only one life, why live it as an anachronism?”)

Much of what is now known as “the sexual revolution” has consisted of both women and men filling in the blank this way: “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as … a Swinger!” (Instead of a frustrated, bored monogamist.) In “swinging,” a husband and wife give each other license to copulate with other people. There are no statistics on the subject that mean anything, but I do know that it pops up in conversation today in the most unexpected corners of the country. It is an odd experience to be in De Kalb, Illinois, in the very corncrib of America,* and have some conventional-looking housewife (not housewife, damn it!) come up to you and ask: “Is there much tripling going on in New York?”

“Tripling?”

Tripling turns out to be a practice, in De Kalb, anyway, in which a husband and wife invite a third party—male or female, but more often female—over for an evening of whatever, including polymorphous perversity, even the practices written of in the one-hand magazines, all the things involving tubes and hoses and tourniquets and cups and double-jointed sailors.

One of the satisfactions of this sort of life, quite in addition to the groin spasms, is talk: Let’s talk about Me. Sexual adventurers are given to the most relentless and deadly serious talk… about Me. They quickly succeed in placing themselves onstage in the sexual drama whose outlines were sketched by Freud and then elaborated upon by Wilhelm Reich. Men and women of all sorts, not merely swingers, are given just now to the most earnest sort of talk about the Sexual Me.

A key drama of our own day is Ingmar Bergman’s movie Scenes From a Marriage. In it we see a husband and wife who have good jobs and a well-furnished home but who are unable to “communicate”—to cite one of the signature words of the Me Decade. Then they begin to communicate, and there upon their marriage breaks up and they start divorce proceedings. For the rest of the picture they communicate endlessly, with great candor, but the “relationship”—another signature word—remains doomed. Ironically, the lesson that people seem to draw from this movie has to do with … “the need to communicate.” Scenes From a Marriage is one of those rare works of art, like The Sun Also Rises, that not only succeed in capturing a certain mental atmosphere in fictional form … but also turn around and help radiate it throughout real life. I personally know of two instances in which couples, after years of marriage, went to see Scenes From a Marriage and came home convinced of the “need to communicate.” The discussions began with one of the two saying. Let’s try to be completely candid for once. You tell me exactly what you don’t like about me, and I’ll do the same for you. At this, the starting point, the whole notion is exciting. We’re going to talk about Me! (And I can take it.) I’m going to find out what he (or she) really thinks about me! (Of course, I have my faults, but they’re minor, or else exciting.)

She says. “Go ahead. What don’t you like about me?”

They’re both under the Bergman spell. Nevertheless, a certain sixth sense tells him that they’re on dangerous ground. So he decides to pick something that doesn’t seem too terrible.

“Well,” he says, “one thing that bothers me is that when we meet people for the first time, you never know what to say. Or else you get nervous and start babbling away, and it’s all so banal, it makes me look bad.”

Consciously she’s still telling herself, “I can take it.” But what he has just said begins to seep through her brain like scalding water. What’s he talking about? … makes him look bad? He’s saying I’m unsophisticated, a social liability, and an embarrassment. All those times we’ve gone out, he’s been ashamed of me! (And what makes it worse—it’s the sort of disease for which there’s no cure!) She always knew she was awkward. His crime is: He noticed! He’s known it, too, all along. He’s had contempt for me.

Out loud she says. “Well, I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do about that.”

He detects the petulant note. “Look,” he says. “you’re the one who said to be candid.”

She says, “I know. I want you to be.”

He says, “Well, it’s your turn.”

“Well,” she says, “I’ll tell you something about when we meet people and when we go places. You never clean yourself properly—you don’t know how to wipe yourself. Sometimes we’re standing there talking to people, and there’s … a smell. And I’ll tell you something else. People can tell it’s you.”

And he’s still telling himself, “I can take it”—but what inna namea Christ is this?

He says, “But you’ve never said anything—about anything like that.”

She says, “But I tried to. How many times have I told you about your dirty drawers when you were taking them off at night?”

Somehow this really makes him angry… . All those times … and his mind immediately fastens on Harley Thatcher and his wife, whom he has always wanted to impress… . From underneath my $250 suits—I smelled of shit! What infuriates him is that this is a humiliation from which there’s no recovery. How often have they sniggered about it later?—or not invited me places? Is it something people say every time my name comes up? And all at once he is intensely annoyed with his wife, not because she never told him all these years—but simply because she knows about his disgrace—and she was the one who brought him the bad news!

From that moment on they’re ready to get the skewers in. It’s only a few minutes before they’ve begun trying to sting each other with confessions about their little affairs, their little slipping around, their little coitus on the sly—“Remember that time I told you my flight from Buffalo was canceled?”—and at that juncture the ranks of those who can take it become very thin, indeed. So they communicate with great candor! and break up! and keep on communicating! and then find the relationship hopelessly doomed.

One couple went into group therapy. The other went to a marriage counselor. Both types of therapy are very popular forms, currently, of Let’s talk about Me. This phase of the breakup always provides a rush of exhilaration, for what more exhilarating topic is there than … Me? Through group therapy, marriage counseling, and other forms of “psychological consultation” they can enjoy that same Me euphoria that the very rich have enjoyed for years in psychoanalysis. The cost of the new Me sessions is only $10 to $30 an hour, whereas psychoanalysis runs from $50 to $125. The woman’s exhilaration, however, is soon complicated by the fact that she is (in the typical case) near or beyond the cutoff age of 35 and will have to retire to the reservation.

Well, my dear Mature Moderns … Ingmar never promised you a rose garden!

VII. How You Do It, My Boys!

In September of 1969, in London, on the King’s Road, in a restaurant called Alexander’s, I happened to have dinner with a group of people that included a young American named Jim Haynes and an Australian woman named Germaine Greer. Neither name meant anything to me at the time, although I never forgot Germaine Greer. She was a thin, hard-looking woman with a tremendous curly electric hairdo and the most outrageous Naugahyde mouth I had ever heard on a woman. (I was shocked.) After a while she got bored and set fire to her hair with a match. Two waiters ran over and began beating the flames out with napkins. This made a noise like pigeons taking off in the park. Germaine Greer sat there with a sublime smile on her face, as if to say: “How you do it, my boys!”

Jim Haynes and Germaine Greer had just published the first issue of a newspaper that All London was talking about. It was called Suck. It was founded shortly after Screw in New York, and was one of the progenitors of the sex newspapers that today are so numerous that in Los Angeles it is not uncommon to see fifteen coin-operated newspaper racks in a row on the sidewalk. One will be for the Los Angeles Times, a second for the Herald-Examiner, and the other thirteen for the sex papers. Suck was full of pictures of gaping thighs, moist lips, stiffened giblets, glistening nodules, dirty stories, dirty poems, essays on sexual freedom, and a gossip column detailing the sexual habits of people whose names I assumed were fictitious. Then I came to an item that said, “Anyone who wants group sex in New York and likes fat girls, contact L——— R———,” except that it gave her full name. She was a friend of mine.

Even while Germaine Greer’s hair blazed away, the young American, Jim Haynes, went on with a discourse about the aims of Suck. To put it in a few words, the aim was sexual liberation and, through sexual liberation, the liberation of the spirit of man. If you were listening, to this speech and had read Suck, or even if you hadn’t, you were likely to be watching Jim Haynes’s face for the beginnings of a campy grin, a smirk, a wink, a roll of the eyeballs—something to indicate that he was just having his little joke. But it soon became clear that he was one of those people who exist on a plane quite … Beyond Irony. Whatever it had been for him once, sex had now become a religion, and he had developed a theology in which the orgasm had become a form of spiritual ecstasy.

The same curious journey—from sexology to theology—has become a feature of swinging in the United States. At the Sandstone sex farm in the Santa Monica Mountains, people of all class levels gather for weekends in the nude, and copulate in the living room, on the lawn, out by the pool, on the tennis courts, with the same open, free, liberated spirit as dogs in the park or baboons in a tree. In conversation, however, the atmosphere is quite different. The air becomes humid with solemnity. Close your eyes and you think you’re at a nineteenth-century Wesleyan summer encampment and tent-meeting lecture series. It’s the soul that gets a workout here, brethren. And yet this is not a hypocritical cover-up. It is merely an example of how people in even the most secular manifestation of the Me Decade—free-lance spread-‘em, ziggy-zag rutting—are likely to go through the usual stages… . Let’s talk about Me… . Let’s find the Real Me… . Let’s get rid of all the hypocrisies and impedimenta and false modesties that obscure the Real Me… . Ah! At the apex of my soul is a spark of the Divine … which I perceive in the pure moment of ecstasy (which your textbooks call “the orgasm,” but which I know to be Heaven)… .

This notion even has a pedigree. Many sects, such as the Left-handed Shakti and the Gnostic onanists, have construed the orgasm to be the kairos, the magic moment, the divine ecstasy. There is evidence that the early Mormons and the Oneida movement did likewise. In fact, the notion of some sort of divine ecstasy runs throughout the religious history of the past 2,500 years. As Max Weber and Joachim Wach have illustrated in detail, every major modern religion, as well as countless long-gone minor ones, has originated not with a theology or a set of values or a social goal or even a vague hope of a life hereafter. They have all originated, instead, with a small circle of people who have shared some over-whelming ecstasy or seizure, a “vision,” a “trance,” a hallucination—an actual neurological event, in fact, a dramatic change in metabolism, something that has seemed to light up the entire central nervous system. The Mohammedan movement (Islam) originated in hallucinations, apparently the result of fasting, meditation, and isolation in the darkness of caves, which can induce sensory deprivation. Some of the same practices were common with many types of Buddhists. The early Hindus and Zoroastrians seem to have been animated by a hallucinogenic drug known as soma in India and haoma in Persia. The origins of Christianity are replete with “visions.” The early Christians used wine for ecstatic purposes, to the point where the Apostle Paul (whose conversion on the road to Damascus began with a “vision”) complained that it was degenerating into sheer drunkenness at the services. These great drafts of wine survive in minute quantities in the ritual of Communion. The Bacchic orders, the Sufi, Voodooists, Shakers, and many others used feasts (the bacchanals), ecstatic dancing (“the whirling dervishes”), and other forms of frenzy to achieve the kairos … the moment … here and now! … the feeling! … In every case the believers took the feeling of ecstasy to be the sensation of the light of God flooding into their souls. They felt like vessels of the Divine, of the All-in-One. Only afterward did they try to interpret the experience in the form of theologies, earthly reforms, moral codes, liturgies.

Nor have these been merely the strange practices of the Orient and the Middle East. Every major religious wave that has developed in America has started out the same way: with a flood of ecstatic experiences. The First Great Awakening, as it is known to historians, came in the 1740s and was led by preachers of “the New Light” such as Jonathan Edwards, Gilbert Tennent, and George Whitefield. They and their followers were known as “enthusiasts” and “come-outers,” terms of derision that referred to the frenzied, holy-rolling, pentecostal shout tempo of their services and to their visions, trances, shrieks, and agonies, which are preserved in great Rabelaisian detail in the writings of their detractors.

The Second Great Awakening came in the period from 1825 to 1850 and took the form of a still wilder hoe-down camp-meeting revivalism, of ceremonies in which people barked, bayed, fell down in fits and swoons, rolled on the ground, talked in tongues, and even added a touch of orgy. The Second Awakening originated in western New York State, where so many evangelical movements caught fire it became known as “the Burned-Over District.” Many new seets, such as Oneida and the Shakers, were involved. But so were older ones, such as the evangelical Baptists. The fervor spread throughout the American frontier (and elsewhere) before the Civil War. The most famous sect of the Second Great Awakening was the Mormon movement, founded by a 24-year-old. Joseph Smith, and a small group of youthful comrades. This bunch was regarded as wilder, crazier, more obscene, more of a threat, than the entire lot of hippie communes of the 1960s put together. Smith was shot to death by a lynch mob in Carthage, Illinois, in 1844, which was why the Mormons, now with Brigham Young at the helm, emigrated to Utah. A sect, incidentally, is a religion with no political power. Once the Mormons settled, built, and ruled Utah, Mormonism became a religion sure enough … and eventually wound down to the slow, firm beat of respectability… .

We are now—in the Me Decade—seeing the upward roll (and not yet the crest, by any means) of the third great religious wave in American history, one that historians will very likely term the Third Great Awakening. Like the others it has begun in a flood of ecstasy, achieved through LSD and other psychedelics, orgy, dancing (the New Sufi and the Hare Krishna), meditation, and psychic frenzy (the marathon encounter). This third wave has built up from more diverse and exotic sources than the first two, from therapeutic movements as well as overtly religious movements, from hippies and students of “psi phenomena” and Flying Saucerites as well as charismatic Christians. But other than that, what will historians say about it?

The historian Perry Miller credited the First Great Awakening with helping to pave the way for the American Revolution through its assault on the colonies’ religious establishment and, thereby, on British colonial authority generally. The sociologist Thomas O’Dea credited the Second Great Awakening with creating the atmosphere of Christian asceticism (known as “bleak” on the East Coast) that swept through the Midwest and the West during the nineteenth century and helped make it possible to build communities in the face of great hardship. And the Third Great Awakening? Journalists (historians have not yet tackled the subject) have shown a morbid tendency to regard the various movements in this wave as “fascist.” The hippie movement was often attacked as “fascist” in the late 1960s. Over the past several years a barrage of articles has attacked Scientology, the est movement, and “the Moonies” (followers of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon) along the same lines.

Frankly, this tells us nothing except that journalists bring the same conventional Grim Slide concepts to every subject. The word fascism derives from the old Roman symbol of power and authority, the fasces, a bundle of sticks bound together by thongs (with an ax head protruding from one end). One by one the sticks would be easy to break. Bound together they are invincible Fascist ideology called for binding all classes, all levels, all elements of an entire nation together into a single organization with a single will.

The various movements of the current religious wave attempt very nearly the opposite. They begin with … “Let’s talk about Me.” They begin with the most delicious look inward; with considerable narcissism, in short. When the believers bind together into religions, it is always with a sense of splitting off from the rest of society. We, the enlightened (lit by the sparks at the apexes of our souls), hereby separate ourselves from the lost souls around us. Like all religions before them, they proselytize—but always on promising the opposite of nationalism: a City of Light that is above it all. There is no ecumenical spirit within this Third Great Awakening. If anything, there is a spirit of schism. The contempt the various seers have for one another is breathtaking. One has only to ask, say, Oscar Ichazo of Arica about Carlos Castaneda or Werner Erhard of est to learn that Castaneda is a fake and Erhard is a shallow sloganeer. It’s exhilarating!—to watch the faithful split off from one another to seek ever more perfect and refined crucibles in which to fan the Divine spark … and to talk about Me.

Whatever the Third Great Awakening amounts to, for better or for worse, will have to do with this unprecedented post-World War II American development: the luxury, enjoyed by so many millions of middling folk, of dwelling upon the self. At first glance, Shirley Polykoff’s slogan—“If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a blonde!”—seems like merely another example of a superficial and irritating rhetorical trope ( antanaclasis ) that now happens to be fashionable among advertising copywriters. But in fact the notion of “If I’ve only one life” challenges one of those assumptions of society that are so deep-rooted and ancient, they have no name—they are simply lived by. In this case: man’s age-old belief in serial immortality.

The husband and wife who sacrifice their own ambitions and their material assets in order to provide “a better future” for their children … the soldier who risks his life, or perhaps consciously sacrifices it, in battle … the man who devotes his life to some struggle for “his people” that cannot possibly be won in his lifetime … people (or most of them) who buy life insurance or leave wills … and, for that matter, most women upon becoming pregnant for the first time … are people who conceive of themselves, however unconsciously, as part of a great biological stream. Just as something of their ancestors lives on in them, so will something of them live on in their children … or in their people, their race, their community—for childless people, too, conduct their lives and try to arrange their postmortem affairs with concern for how the great stream is going to flow on. Most people, historically, have not lived their lives as if thinking, “I have only one life to live.” Instead they have lived as if they are living their ancestors’ lives and their offspring’s lives and perhaps their neighbors’ lives as well. They have seen themselves as inseparable from the great tide of chromosomes of which they are created and which they pass on. The mere fact that you were only going to be here a short time and would be dead soon enough did not give you the license to try to climb out of the stream and change the natural order of things. The Chinese, in ancestor worship, have literally worshiped the great tide itself, and not any god or gods. For anyone to renounce the notion of serial immortality, in the West or the East, has been to defy what seems like a law of Nature. Hence the wicked feeling—the excitement!—of “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a ———!” Fill in the blank, if you dare.

And now many dare it! In Democracy in America, Tocqueville (the inevitable and ubiquitous Tocqueville) saw the American sense of equality itself as disrupting the stream, which he called “time’s pattern”: “Not only does democracy make each man forget his ancestors, it hides his descendants from him, and divides him from his contemporaries; it continually turns him back into himself, and threatens, at last, to enclose him entirely in the solitude of his own heart.” A grim prospect to the good Alexis de T.—but what did he know about … Let’s talk about Me!

Tocqueville’s idea of modern man lost “in the solitude of his own heart” has been brought forward into our time in such terminology as alienation (Marx), anomie (Durkheim), the mass man (Ortega y Gasset), and the lonely crowd (Riesman). The picture is always of a creature uprooted by industrialism, packed together in cities with people he doesn’t know, helpless against massive economic and political shifts—in short, a creature like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, a helpless, bewildered, and dispirited slave to the machinery. This victim of modern times has always been a most appealing figure to intellectuals, artists, and architects. The poor devil so obviously needs us to be his Engineers of the Soul, to use a term popular in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. We will pygmalionize this sad lump of clay into a homo novus, a New Man, with a new philosophy, a new aesthetics, not to mention new Bauhaus housing and furniture.

But once the dreary little bastards started getting money in the 1940s, they did an astonishing thing—they took their money and ran. They did something only aristocrats (and intellectuals and artists) were supposed to do—they discovered and started doting on Me! They’ve created the greatest age of individualism in American history! All rules are broken! The prophets are out of business! Where the Third Great Awakening will lead—who can presume to say? One only knows that the great religious waves have a momentum all their own. Neither arguments nor policies nor acts of the legislature have been any match for them in the past. And this one has the mightiest, holiest roll of all, the beat that goes … Me … Me … . Me … Me . . .

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15 great articles by tom wolfe, on american culture, the last american hero is junior johnson. yes, the me decade, the rich have feelings, too, the secret vice, on technology, what if he’s right, the tinkerings of robert noyce, sorry, but your soul just died, one giant leap to nowhere, on politics, radical chic: that party at lenny’s, mau-mauing the flak catchers.

The Birth of The New Journalism

Stalking the billion-footed beast, the kandy-kolored tangerine-flake streamline baby, the electric kool-aid acid test, see also…, 15 great essays by joan didion, 20 great articles by hunter s. thompson.

About The Electric Typewriter We search the net to bring you the best nonfiction, articles, essays and journalism

Tom Wolfe and the Age of Self-Involvement

There’s writers in there like Pynchon. But if he were a realist. There’s thorough knowledge of American history and the people who wrote it down and made it up. There’s glee in repetition and reinvention, and smart set-ups that read like omissions at first, and omissions that you then make do the work of a smart setup. Tom Wolfe’s signature essay “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening” is a joyful trip into the American maudlin, dateline 1976. It’s narrated like a novel, the art form Wolfe denied its primus inter pares place in the literary quiver; that is, until he succumbed to it.

Wolfe, who wrote like he dressed – impeccably and with sprezzatura , but in an initially off-putting way – died on Monday, May 14, 2018. His iconoclasm did not end in death. The New York Times obituary managed to get his age and birth date wrong in its first go-around, and required a second correction to fix the title of one of his novels. Much hyperbole, as with any literary death, has accompanied Wolfe’s passing, as has much reflection on his place in the media world, and the media that he placed in the world.

If Wolfe was an icon, he also behaved like one. The white suit he trademark wore, Wolfe said, made him look like a Martian, and that helped people relate to him, tell him their stories, see him as an impartial third, an observer from a disinterested place reporting back to the mothership. Only the mothership sat pat in New York City, sharing the life of the elites he castigated in his most successful novel, Bonfire of the Vanities . Before Wolfe was a novelist, however, lauded and applauded first, panned and criticized for his later works, he was non-fiction writer. A journalist; a New Journalist. In essence, a fiction writer of non-fiction.

“Me”

Reading the “Me Decade” essay, you’ll be struck by what passes for reporting here, even by the standards of the scene-setting New Journalism that Wolfe co-created with, among others, Hunter S. Thompson. In one of the most-cited passages (presumably because it starts the thing off), Wolfe reports from the plush, solvent-cleaned floor of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. His heroine is the woman who screams “hemorrhoids!” when asked to name the one thing in her life she most wants to get rid off. Wolfe smilingly berates her on the self-centeredness of her choice, then goes on to imagine a deep dive into her mind, constructing the story that lies behind that moment of clarity and catharsis:

She begins to feel her hemorrhoids in all their morbid presence. […] Well–for God’s sake!–in her daily life, even at work, especially at work, and she works for a movie distributor, her whole picture of herself was of her… seductive physical presence . […] When she walked into the office each morning, everyone, women as well as men, checked her out. She knew that.

But, alas, the hemorrhoidal “peanut” intervenes (the same essay features a description of Jimmy Carter, so who knows, peanuts may have been on the national mind in America two centuries post Declaration of Independence), messes up that picture, creates a cleavage between how she looks (“The Sexual Princess!”) and what she wants vs. what she thinks about: “As she smiled sublimely at her conquest, she also had to sit on her chair lopsided, with one cheek of her buttocks higher than the other…”

The age of the piece shows. Not just in its inherent unquestioned sexism or casual inclusion of homosexuality as among the host of things people at self-help or self-actualization seminars want to get rid of, or the mentions of lifestyles involving either “Sevilles and 450SL’s” or “Superstar Qiana sport shirts,” things a present-day reader likely will have to punch into a search box. That is, if they don’t just stare at the brand names in confusion for a microsecond and then decide they don’t care enough to even do that.

The age of the piece also presents itself, and somewhat sadly, in the fact that there was a gushing inventiveness to Wolfe’s 70s and 80s pieces of reporting, pieces which he was actually able to get published and paid for, and that’s not something we’re used to anymore. New Journalism, to be sure, was influential. But its excesses have been cut down to size. Journalism, even the highly readable kind, seems tame in comparison today. Not in content, but in language; edited or self-edited into tonal conformity. Even if a writer as gifted as Wolfe produced something in a style as eccentric as Wolfe’s today, it obviously cannot have the same effect. You can only break new ground once. The frivolousness would be muted.

That is not to say that journalism is rulebound now. In an increasingly fragmented media ecosphere, the fraying and frothing fringes, the extremists and rightwing million-dollar pundits hired to be performance artists against the other side, have long lost any semblance of decorum. But inventive, happy about the language they use, knowledgeable and excited to try out and on words for size, to break the molds of the newspaper article headline/standfirst/body text triad or the scripted TV narrative, they are not. And in terms of value: on cable, certainly, money follows the performance. But are writer-journalists highly paid? To the tune of being able to afford 12 rooms in Manhattan ?

Admittedly, there is a “look here” flashiness in a Wolfe essay. There’s that stringing-too-many-words-together-with-hyphens tendency (on Jimmy Carter: “he was of the Missionary lectern-pounding amen ten-finger C-major-chord Sister-Martha-at-the-Yamaha-keyboard loblolly piny-woods Baptist faith”). And some of the things that in 1976 were fresh forty plus years on no longer are.

But these are not just the rantings of a word-heavy Cassandra who doesn’t like the way that America, filled to its cultural gills with baby boomers cusping into adulthood, is suddenly behaving. They are that, but they also are the observation of an astute critic, of someone trained in American Studies by his Yale PhD program, someone whose referential drive-bys include swift freethrows to Perry Miller and Max Weber and snide digs at Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe – a prefigurement here of Wolfe’s more ornate taste in architecture and his longer takedown of the Bauhaus in his 1981 From Bauhaus to Our House . Even if you find, as I do, the criticism of the German-inspired clean, functional architecture and design misguided and overwrought, you cannot deny that, it has in the reverence that acolytes award it, departed from the ideal of a democratic, down-to-earth way of equipping people with living spaces and material goods. As Wolfe writes in a footnote included with “Me Decade”:

Ignored or else held in contempt by working people, Bauhaus design eventually triumphed as a symbol of wealth and privilege […]. [T]he Barcelona chair [.] now sells for $1.680 […]. The high price is due in no small part to the chair’s Worker Housing Honest Materials: stainless steel and leather.

Some of this is just Wolfe being a grouch, a Christopher Lasch-type social critic with more of a flourish and less academic rigor – in his 2006 NEH Jefferson Lecture, for example, Wolfe casually omits both Johann Gottfried Herder and Henri Bergson’s coinages when he talks about “homo loquax,” misidentifying that creature, too, as “talking man” instead of the “chattering man” Bergson had in mind. 1

Tom, “Me,” and You

But Wolfe’s writings contain truly original insight and a rare talent for telling stories of approachable verisimilitude. Ken Kesey, the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and subject’s of Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test , attested Wolfe that his book was highly accurate. It was a driving narrative about an almost Christlike guru and his “Merry Pranksters” traveling the United States in a VW bus, taking LSD-laced Kool-Aid. Wolfe’s imaginative language made that book as much as its story did. Writing upon the publication of Electric Kool-Aid in 1969, the Guardian 2 summed up Wolfe’s use of language and cadence:

The style uses the repetition and the compressed adjectival forms of a poem, and the reader is pleasantly caught up in the internal rhythms. For all its seeming superabundance of punctuation and participles, every word seems placed with a care and a skill of contrivance which should command respect.

Gay Talese, fellow New Journalist and impeccable dresser, called Wolfe a magician for his use of words. But it was not only words that Wolfe’s writing consisted of. It was ellipses, too, dots, dashes, exclamation marks and transcribed primal screams:

“Eeeeeeeeeooooooohhhhhhhhheeeeeooooooooh!” “Aiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaieeeeeeeeeeeeeeohhhhhhhhhheeeeeeaiaiai!”

Wolfe’s greatest talent though, perhaps, was the effortless translation from eye to analysis and judgment to page. And judgement there was in spades. Wolfe may have been avantgarde in style, but he was conservative in substance. He supported Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, citing the latter’s “decisiveness” in starting the Iraq War as something that impressed him. Wolfe never held back with opinions, whether clearly stated or heavily implied in his writings. The criticism leveled at these opinions is valid. But there remains, through it all, the fact that Wolfe was influential. In style, and in substance.

The most important thing a writer can do is to observe, to study and then write. Wolfe did that, iconically attired, days piling on the next, 1500 words sunrise to sundown, the equivalent of ten triple-spaced pages at a time. For decades. Ten triple-spaced pages at a time.

The lecture also begins with a wry humblebrag that is Wolfian to the core: “Ladies and Gentlemen, this evening it is my modest intention to tell you in the short time we have together . . . everything you will ever need to know about the human beast.” National Endowment for the Humanities. Awards & Honors: 2006 Jefferson Lecturer. Tom Wolfe Lecture, “The Human Beast” . ↩
“From the Archive, 2 May 1969: Acid Adventures” in: The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2014/may/02/tom-wolfe-electric-kool-aid-acid-test ↩

The Origins of Speech

Eunuchs of the universe, faking west, going east, the rich have feelings, too, one giant leap to nowhere, greenwich time, a city built of clay, remembering wfb, the pirate pose, the (naked) city and the undead, the human beast, a cross before werewolves, the 2 columbus circle game, how new york city can get its groove back: pleasure principles, mcluhan’s new world, the building that isn’t there, cont., the building that isn’t there, the endless ground zero, genius and virtuosity: the art of ray kinstler, hooking up: what life was like at the turn of the second millennium: an american’s world, in the land of the rococo marxists, an american sculptor, robert noyce and his congregation, sorry, but your soul just died, frederick hart: a tribute, late bloomers, the nation’s pulse, stalking the billion-footed beast, “a new standard for living”: the lustron house, 1946-1950, the reagan legacy, dangerous obsessions, the great relearning, snob’s progress, the worship of art, the tinkerings of robert noyce, review of “high life / low life”, tom wolfe at columbia, the evolution of the species, the exploits of el sid, from bauhaus to our house (part 2), from bauhaus to our house (part 1), the simplicity of line and a british clutter, the lower classes, the secret heart of the new york culturatus, in our time, columbus and the moon, the birds and the bees, the “me” decade and the third great awakening, the intelligent co-ed’s guide to america, a man’s city, the painted word, how high the moon, why they aren’t writing the great american novel anymore, the new journalism: a la recherche des whichy thickets, the birth of ‘the new journalism’; eyewitness report, mau-mauing the flak catchers, radical chic, the author’s story, pornoviolence, the courts must curb culture (speaking out), the secret vice, reply to dwight macdonald, what if he is right, lost in the whichy thicket: the new yorker—ii, tiny mummies the true story of the ruler of 43rd street’s land of the walking dead, the last american hero is junior johnson. yes, down with sin (speaking out), the girl of the year, las vegas (what) las vegas (can’t hear you too noisy) las vegas, the marvelous mouth.

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Tom Wolfe Made Everyone Talk About Him

By Kurt Andersen

Mr. Andersen is a co-founder of Spy magazine.

May 15, 2018

In the summer after ninth grade, 1969, when I checked out a Tom Wolfe book from the Omaha Public Library, I had no real idea who he was, although he’d been a celebrity for a few years already. Not as famous as my favorite living writer at the time, Kurt Vonnegut, but famous enough that in Mr. Vonnegut’s rave review of Mr. Wolfe’s first book in this newspaper in 1965, he wrote, “Everybody talks about him.”

His second book, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” blew my 14-year-old mind. The revelations were not so much about the countercultural miasma of drugs and mischief and alternate realities it depicted; my older sister had introduced me to pot and my older brother had a psychedelic band called the Naked Afternoon. Rather, it was the writing , journalism unlike any I’d ever read, sympathetic and evocative and inventive but also sharp-eyed and precise and acerbic. He’d been embedded with these freaks but didn’t go native, and returned with a beautifully observed, perfectly coherent chronicle of half-mad adventures.

It was reading Tom Wolfe the summer before I started high school that made me decide to become a professional writer.

Among the inventors of New Journalism in the 1960s, only Joan Didion had a comparable genius for depicting that era of loosey-goosey weirdness with such rigor as it was happening, but unlike her, Mr. Wolfe was on the Hunter Thompson-Terry Southern-Nora Ephron side of the pantheon, writers inclined to find the comedy.

Which is why, when Graydon Carter and I were dreaming up Spy magazine in the 1980s as a hybrid of journalism and satire, Mr. Wolfe was one of our models. He’d made his name with an article making fun of The New Yorker (“ Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street’s Land of the Walking Dead!”), so naturally Spy made fun of The New Yorker again and again. We even asked him to contribute, but he politely declined — he was finishing up a novel, he informed us, his first, at age 56.

When I arrived at my next editor in chief job, at New York magazine, my fundamentalist vision was to make it as much as possible like the New York to which Mr. Wolfe (and Ms. Ephron) had been a founding contributor 20 years earlier. After being jettisoned from that position in short order, I felt it was time to make good on my dreamy plan to write fiction. I didn’t consciously model my first novel, “Turn of the Century,” on Mr. Wolfe’s first novel, “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” but I was a middle-aged magazine journalist, and it was a big, panoramic social comedy set in New York about the media and rich people and failure, so when half the reviews and articles compared it to “Bonfire,” I just shut up and smiled.

Of course Mr. Wolfe has been an influence on me, even when I wasn’t aware of it. He had next to no education in the history of art or architecture, but he impertinently presumed to publish “The Painted Word” (1975) and “From Bauhaus to Our House” (1981). I had the same lack of education, and in 1984 I presumed to become Time’s architecture and design critic.

In 2015, I was deep into work on my first big nonfiction book, “Fantasyland,” when I realized I was once again standing on his shoulders. In a 1976 New York cover article he coined “the ‘Me’ Decade” to describe the 1970s, which I’d misremembered as some trifling swipe at yuppie narcissism. In fact, the essay’s full title was “ The ‘Me’ Decade and Third Great Awakening ,” a historically grounded, uncannily prescient explanation of how beliefs in the paranormal and extraterrestrial visitors and extreme Christianity were together transforming America.

I’ve been pleased by the stories of his personal kindness in my Twitter feed since he died on Monday, at age 88 — and a little surprised, given the multifaceted antagonism he enjoyed provoking for half a century.

There are those who couldn’t abide his cultural conservatism, which they took for complicity with political conservatism. His smug impertinence, what Mr. Vonnegut in that early review called “the bitchy melody” of his writing, made enemies of subjects and their families, friends and acolytes.

Was John Updike still angry about the 1965 swipes in “ Tiny Mummies!” in 1998, when he wrote in The New Yorker that Mr. Wolfe’s fiction “ amounts to entertainment, not literature, even literature in a modest aspirant form”? Or maybe Mr. Updike simply considered him a mediocre novelist — earnest literary disapproval is a third bucket of Wolfe antipathy, commingled with a fourth, resentment of people who find success after changing professional lanes in midlife.

A big factor that shaped his sensibility, I think, is that he (like … me!) came to New York from the provinces, which equipped him to see and experience the city (and by extension America) with the outsider’s special combination of yearning and shock, romance and clearsightedness, as simultaneously ridiculous and wonderful. He unquestionably arrived with a willingness to be lucky, the one necessary trait for people who come to New York from elsewhere, according to E. B. White, the great New Yorker writer — who, of course, hated Tom Wolfe.

Kurt Andersen is the author of “Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History,” and the host of the public radio program “Studio 360.”

The Lexicon of Tom Wolfe

Remembering the writer’s contributions to the English language, which went far beyond the most obvious catchphrases that he popularized

Tom Wolfe poses in his New York apartment in 1998

The paeans to Tom Wolfe, who died on Monday at the age of 88, inevitably extol his colorfully inventive use of language across his decades of fiction and nonfiction writing. As the New York Times obituary observes , “He had a pitiless eye and a penchant for spotting trends and then giving them names, some of which—like ‘Radical Chic’ and ‘the Me Decade’—became American idioms.”

Wolfe’s contributions to the English language go far beyond the most obvious catchphrases that he popularized. The Oxford English Dictionary includes about 150 quotations from Wolfe’s writings, and in many cases, he is the earliest known source for words and phrases that have worked their way into the lexicon. Here is a survey of some of his key linguistic innovations.

As an early proponent of what came to be known as New Journalism, Wolfe had a flashy sense for language from the very beginning: Consider the title of his 1963 essay that put him on the map, a piece for Esquire on custom cars: “There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy Kolored (Thphhhhhh!) Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (Rahghhh!) Around the Bend (Brummmmmmmmmmmmmmmm)…”

The World’s Tallest Waterslide Was a Terrible, Tragic Idea

The Pet Chicken ‘From Hell’

A year later, an essay of Wolfe’s for Harper’s Bazaar titled “The New Art Gallery Society” provided the first of his many OED -anointed neologisms: aw-shucks as a verb meaning “to behave with (affected) bashfulness or self-deprecation.” Describing a party for the reopening of the Museum of Modern Art, Wolfe wrote, “Up on the terrace, Stewart Udall, the Secretary of the Interior of the United States, is sort of aw-shucks ing around.”

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test , his 1968 account of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, introduced a number of terms straight out of the drug-fueled counterculture, like Owsley , for “an extremely potent, high-quality type of LSD” (named after Owsley Stanley, the Grateful Dead soundman who manufactured millions of doses of acid). The book also brought us edge city , defined by the OED as “a notional place outside the bounds of conventional society” (“It’s time to take the Prankster circus further on toward Edge City”), and the adjective balls-out , defined as “unrestrained, uninhibited” (“The trip, in fact the whole deal, was a risk-all balls-out plunge into the unknown”).

Wolfe was clearly in a neologistic frame of mind in 1970, when he wrote two of his most famous essays. From “ Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s ,” published in New York , we of course get radical chic (“the fashionable affectation of radical left-wing views”), though he seems to have appropriated the phrase from Seymour Krim, who had used it earlier in the year in his collection of essays Shake It for the World, Smartass . And the title of “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers” contributed two more coinages: mau-mauing (“using menacing or intimidating tactics against”), and flak catcher (“one who deals with and deflects adverse or hostile comment, questions, etc., in order to protect a person or institution from unfavorable publicity”).

A 1976 New York cover story is responsible for one of Wolfe’s most enduring phrases: “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening.” Along with me decade as his term for the 1970s (“regarded as a period characterized by an obsessive preoccupation with personal fulfillment and self-gratification”), the OED credits Wolfe with a lesser-known expression: hardballer in the sense of “a person who is ruthless and uncompromising, esp. in politics or business” (as in: “Charles Colson, the former hardballer of the Nixon Administration, announces for Jesus”).

Wolfe once again picked a title that was destined for lexical immortality when he wrote his 1979 book on the Project Mercury astronauts, The Right Stuff . Though the right stuff is actually documented by the OED back to 1748 in the sense of “something that is just what is required” (especially alcohol or money), Wolfe’s book provided a new semantic twist: “the necessary qualities for a given job or task,” that mysterious essence imbuing the test pilots drafted for the Mercury program.

The Right Stuff also helped popularize some expressions that were previously known only in aviation and aeronautics circles. One is push the envelope , meaning “to approach or go beyond the current limits of performance,” which the OED notes had appeared in the magazine Aviation Week & Space Technology a year before Wolfe brought it to a mainstream audience. Another is screw the pooch , meaning “to make a (disastrous) mistake,” which Wolfe famously used in recounting Virgil “Gus” Grissom’s botched splashdown after becoming the second American in space. The movie version reinforced the notion that Grissom had screwed the pooch, though the malfunction was likely not the astronaut’s fault. (For a deep dive into how screw the pooch evolved from the earlier expression fuck the dog , see my 2014 piece for Slate .)

Wolfe kept up his penchant for concocting new words in the go-go ’80s, such as his coinage of plutography , a play on pornography . “This may be the decade of plutography,” he told the Chicago Tribune in 1985, explaining that “plutography is the graphic description of the acts of the rich.” At the time, Wolfe was busy working on his own plutographic opus: his first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities , published in 1987.

The most notable expression to come out of The Bonfire of the Vanities is Master of the Universe , though that phrase actually dates back to the work of John Dryden in 1690, with the meaning “a person or being that controls everything.” In the early 1980s, “Masters of the Universe” took on a new life for Mattel’s superhero franchise of He-Man, She-Ra, and the rest, spun off into action figures, comic books, and animated TV series. Wolfe’s protagonist, Sherman McCoy, applies that omnipotent term to the financial world: “On Wall Street he and a few others—how many?—three hundred, four hundred, five hundred?—had become precisely that … Masters of the Universe. There was … no limit whatsoever!”

Bonfire also illustrated Wolfe’s keen ear for the vernacular, with different characters voicing the now-famous New York City refrain, fuhgedaboudit . To take the example cited by the OED , Goldberg, a police detective, says, “In the Bronx or Bed-Stuy, fuhgedaboudit. Bed-Stuy’s the worst.” Former Brooklyn borough president Marty Markowitz must not have taken the knock against Bedford-Stuyvesant to heart, since during his tenure he put “Fuhgeddaboudit” on a highway sign leaving Brooklyn, showing how the interjection had become firmly entrenched as a tongue-in-cheek marker of local identity.

Wolfe’s later novels ( A Man in Full , I Am Charlotte Simmons , and Back to Blood ) were not quite as fertile for introducing new words, though he continued to keep tabs on developments in the language. The germ for I Am Charlotte Simmons came from a 2000 essay, “Hooking Up,” that investigated the “hook-up” culture of American college students. But Wolfe was hardly in the forefront on this, as Connie Eble reports in her book Slang and Sociability that undergraduates at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill were using hook up to mean “to find a partner for romance or sex” since the mid-’80s. While Wolfe at the end of his career may have moved from being a linguistic leader to merely a follower, his decades of creativity with the written word have undoubtedly left an enduring impact.

The definitive works of Tom Wolfe

Social Sharing

Tom Wolfe, a pioneer of "new journalism" and author of 17 books, has died in New York at the age of 88 . Wolfe was known for his wildly evocative descriptions of American life — coining phrases like, "radical chic" and "the me decade" — whether he was satirizing the struggle for power in New York or chronicling the cross-country adventures of LSD devotees. He began his career as a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune in 1962 and developed a following over the decades for his fiction and nonfiction. Here's a selection of some of the work that has defined his career.

Listen to Tom Wolfe's 2005 conversation with Eleanor Wachtel on Writers & Company

The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby (1965)

The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby, an essay collection and Wolfe's first book, documents the emergence of a new American aesthetic in the 1960s. In cities across the U.S., Wolfe dove into thriving subcultures that marked a divergence from the "elite culture" of the past — bringing bouffant hairstyles, the Twist and stock car racing to the fore. The title essay, which described the "flamboyant kustomized kars" designed and owned by California teenagers, was originally published by Esquire in 1963.

Bonus fact: The book was praised by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. as, "An excellent book by a genius."

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968)

In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, a work of nonfiction, Wolfe writes about the drug-fuelled world of Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters. Formerly a star athlete, scholar and all-around Golden Boy, Kesey was an ardent user of LSD and led his Merry Pranksters on a wild tour of America in the first psychedelic bus, making friends with the Hell's Angels, disrupting a Unitarian Church convention and always ducking law enforcement. The book is considered a classic example of 'New Journalism.'

Bonus fact: Tom Wolfe told The Observer in 2008 that he never tried LSD while trailing the Merry Pranksters: "I thought hard about it for about six seconds."

The Right Stuff (1979)

Wolfe had a knack for getting to the heart of an American obsession, and while on a Rolling Stone assignment in the 1970s, he turned his attention to space exploration. His eventual book, The Right Stuff, details the inner-lives of early American astronauts like John Glenn, Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom and their determination to dominate the space age.

Bonus fact: The Right Stuff became a film in 1983, starring Dennis Quaid, Sam Shepard, Scott Glenn and Ed Harris. It won four Academy Awards: best sound, best film editing, best effects and sound effects editing and best music, original score.

The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987)

After publishing several successful books of nonfiction, Wolfe was repeatedly asked why he hadn't written a novel yet. He responded with an immediate bestseller in The Bonfire of the Vanities, the satirical tale of a young investment banker, self-regarded 'Master of the Universe' and Park Avenue-dwelling white man, Sherman McCoy. In the book, McCoy is arrested for a hit-and-run in the Bronx that sent Henry Lamb, a Black teenager, to the hospital. The book explores racial and social tensions, as well as the greed and politics of 1980s New York.

Bonus fact: The title is a reference to an event named by historians as Bonfire of the Vanities . In 1497, members of the Florentine public gave Dominican friar Girolama Savonarola "sinful objects" — like cosmetics, artworks, dresses and books — to burn. Several "bonfire of the vanities" followed until the 15th century.

A Man in Full (1998)

Wolfe's second novel, following more than a decade after The Bonfire of the Vanities, was another big commercial success. A Man in Full documents the simmering racial tensions in the U.S. through the stories of Conrad Hensley, a Black man thrown in jail over a parking infraction, his former boss, southern real estate developer Charlie Croker, and Roger White II, a prominent Black lawyer who is asked to represent a college football star in a sexual assault case.

Bonus fact: Though the book was nominated for a National Book Award, it did not impress literary heavyweights like Norman Mailer, who said: "Tom may be the hardest-working show-off the literary world has ever owned."

U.S. Intellectual History Blog

April 4, 2015

Whatever Happened to the “‘Me’ Decade”?

Last week, Gary Dahl, creator of the Pet Rock, passed away at the age of 78. For those of you who are too young to remember them, Pet Rocks were small, roughly egg-shaped stones sold, nestled in straw, in small cardboard boxes (complete with air holes) for $3.95. They came with an instruction manual for the care of the Pet Rock. Gary Dahl began marketing them in late 1975. And they became an enormous, instant cultural sensation. Dahl quickly sold over a million and a half Pet Rocks. In its typically thorough obituary for Gary Dahl, published on March 31 (thank goodness, as publishing it the next day might have made some mistake the story for an April Fools’ joke), the New York Times explained the Pet Rock sensation in the following way:

[T]he concept of a “pet” that required no actual work and no real commitment resonated with the self-indulgent ’70s, and before long a cultural phenomenon was born.

This explanation struck me as simultaneously implausible and very interesting. It’s implausible because there was nothing very self-indulgent about the Pet Rock. It was inexpensive. It provided no immediate pleasure. It was relatively difficult to consume conspicuously, though the joke embodied in the Pet Rock was about, among other things, conspicuous consumption.

Here’s why I found the New York Times’ implausible explanation so interesting. The idea of the “self-indulgent ’70s” is a variation of one of the most common contemporary descriptions of that era: the ‘Me’ Decade. This description of the Seventies had extraordinary currency during that decade. But it is little reflected in the historiography of the Seventies. Recent books have characterized the Seventies as the age of Nixon , the beginning of an Age of Fracture , the beginning of the age of the culture wars , the key moment in the transformation of America from an industrial to a finance-driven economy , an age of fear , a period of working class decline , and a moment of political realignment in which the family and ideas about the family played key roles . But as far as I know the idea of the Seventies as the “‘Me’ Decade” has faded from the historical literature, though the Times’ obituary for Gary Dahl suggests it lives on in the public mind.

Though the phrase “The ‘Me’ Decade” may have been coined a few years earlier, its popularity took off following the publication of an essay by the journalist, novelist, and cultural critic Tom Wolfe entitled “ The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening ” that appeared in the August 23, 1976, issue of New York magazine. Read nearly forty years later, Wolfe’s essay is learned, breezy, fun, and terribly thin in its argument. Since World War II, Wolfe argues, America has enjoyed nearly universal prosperity. “True,” he briefly admits, “nothing has solved the plight of those at the very bottom, the chronically unemployed of the slums.” [1] But everyone else has money to burn following thirty years of prosperity:

In America truck drivers, mechanics, factory workers, policemen, firemen, and garbagemen make so much money—$15,000 to $20,000 (or more) per year is not uncommon—that the word proletarian can no longer be used in this country with a straight face. So one now says lower middle class. One can’t even call workingmen blue collar any longer. They all have on collars like Joe Namath’s or Johnny Bench’s or Walt Frazier’s. They all have on $35 Superstar Qiana sport shirts with elephant collars and 1940s Airbrush Wallpaper Flowers Buncha Grapes and Seashell designs all over them.

But to the great disappointment of Ivy League-educated elites, who Wolfe also mocks and who had ideas for improving the lives of the less well off, the newly wealthy common man “took his money and ran.” He would “realize his potential as a human being” on his own terms. And these terms, according to Wolfe, could basically be summed up in one word: “ME!”

Wolfe begins his essay with a long, graphic anecdote about a woman at an est seminar obsessed with her hemorrhoids, which constantly threaten to destroy her feeling of sexiness that lies at the core of her self-understanding. This is pretty clearly a story of narcissism. But a lot of Wolfe’s other targets seem less clearly so. Jimmy Carter’s Baptism and Jerry Brown’s Zen post-Catholicism are also just about me . [2] Feminism is dismissed as entirely a me movement:

In 1961 a copywriter named Shirley Polykoff was working for the Foote, Cone & Belding advertising agency on the Clairol hair-dye account when she came up with the line: “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a blonde!” In a single slogan she had summed up what might be described as the secular side of the Me Decade. “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a—!” (You have only to fill in the blank.) This formula accounts for much of the popularity of the women’s-liberation or feminist movement. “What does a woman want?” said Freud. Perhaps there are women who want to humble men or reduce their power or achieve equality or even superiority for themselves and their sisters. But for every one such woman, there are nine who simply want to fill in the blank as they see fit. “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as . . . a free spirit!” (Instead of . . . a house slave: a cleaning woman, a cook, a nursemaid, a station-wagon hacker, and an occasional household sex aid.) But even that may be overstating it, because often the unconscious desire is nothing more than: Let’s talk about Me. The great unexpected dividend of the feminist movement has been to elevate an ordinary status—woman, housewife—to the level of drama. One’s very existence as a woman —as Me —becomes something all the world analyzes, agonizes over, draws cosmic conclusions from, or, in any event, takes seriously. Every woman becomes Emma Bovary, Cousin Bette, or Nora . . . or Erica Jong or Consuelo Sarah Baehr.

Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage is also a me document, which encourages American married couples to insist on “communicating” about their “relationship” (both of these words appear in scare quotes; the latter, Wolfe declares, is a “signature word” of the Me Decade). After imagining a dialog in which a couple argue about the husband’s inability to properly wipe himself when he shits (if Wolfe’s characters are obsessed with me , Wolfe seems obsessed with their rear ends), Wolfe declares marriage counseling and group therapy for couples are also all about me .

At the end of the essay, Wolfe suggests that all of the contemporary Americans that he discusses (and there are many more than I’ve mentioned) are seeking religious or quasi-religious “ecstatic experiences.” America, he argues, is at the beginning of a Third Great Awakening. The first two Great Awakenings also began with a mass search for ecstatic experiences. But both helped bring about social transformation and community building. But because of the great luxury of American life in the second half of the twentieth century, this third Great Awakening will just be about excessive individualism. Wolfe concludes:

But once the dreary little bastards started getting money in the 1940s, they did an astonishing thing—they took their money and ran. They did something only aristocrats (and intellectuals and artists) were supposed to do—they discovered and started doting on Me! They’ve created the greatest age of individualism in American history! All rules are broken! The prophets are out of business! Where the Third Great Awakening will lead—who can presume to say? One only knows that the great religious waves have a momentum all their own. Neither arguments nor policies nor acts of the legislature have been any match for them in the past. And this one has the mightiest, holiest roll of all, the beat that goes . . . Me . . . Me . . . . Me . . . Me . . .

With the hindsight of several decades, the weaknesses of this argument seem clear. America was not universally prosperous, or even nearly universally prosperous, in the 1970s. Far from feeling like they’d never been wealthier, many Americans in the middle of that decade felt economical squeezed. Both inflation and unemployment were high. Economists and policy makers did not know what to do about this. The U.S. manufacturing base, and with it the quality jobs that had helped fuel post-World War II prosperity, was under threat from foreign competition. The OAPEC oil embargo had made it clear that other countries could disrupt American life with frightening ease. And many Americans were not able to afford est seminars or weekends at Esalen.

In addition to being entirely middle class (or wealthier), Wolfe’s characters seem entirely white…or at the very least devoid of ethnic cultural characteristics that might indicate that they were not. Wolfe also seems unable to see power at play. Movements like est and Scientology – both of which Wolfe presents as key examples of the Me Decade – are presented as if they were called into existence by individual adherents. Wolfe clearly dislikes both feminism and Jimmy Carter’s Baptist faith, but his insistence that both must be about me seems more like an irritable gesture than an argument.

In many ways, Wolfe’s essay on the Me Decade resembles Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism , which appeared about three and half years later, in January, 1979. Like Wolfe, Lasch constructs an argument about how the structure of the American economy has created a psychological state that he characterizes as “narcissism.” And, also like Wolfe, Lasch hates feminism and sees it as an expression of his culture of narcissism. But all aspects of Lasch’s argument are subtler than Wolfe’s, from his understanding of the American economy, to his description of narcissism. And Lasch believes he’s describing an era longer than a decade. Though he points to aspects of ’70s culture similar to those on which Wolfe focuses, the ’60s also instantiate the culture of narcissism. None of this, of course, makes Lasch necessarily any more right than Wolfe, but it does explain why, four decades later, we’re still arguing over The Culture of Narcissism while Wolfe’s essay has largely faded from memory.

From the vantage point of the 2010s, the description of the Seventies as the Me Decade seems to explain little about the changes taking place in that period. Wolfe’s prediction that we’d describe the Seventies as the beginning of a Third Great Awakening has not come true. And the post-war prosperity that provided the foundation for Wolfe’s story seems, in retrospect, to have been disappearing even as Wolfe wrote. Not only is “self-indulgence” not a particular meaningful explanation for the Pet Rock, it is not a very adequate description of the ’70s Zeitgeist as a whole.

But while I don’t think historians should revive the idea of the Me Decade, I do think that we need to grapple with the extraordinary popularity of the idea at the time, especially during the decade’s second half. Precisely because it does not look like a particularly accurate way to sum up the decade in hindsight, we need to think about why it seemed like an accurate way to do so at the time.

__________________________________________________

[1] This is, incidentally, the only mention of this group of people in the entire essay.

[2] Wolfe finds Carter’s Evangelical Christianity hilariously exotic, but makes a point of adding a footnote that discusses the even more “down-home and ecstatic” Primitive Baptist Church, of which Carter was not a member.

Tags: 1970s , Christopher Lasch , Historiography , Tom Wolfe

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I’ve actually taught this essay to undergrads in a U.S. history survey, and they thought, as I do, that it was a terribly elitist attack on ordinary people and their desire to improve their lives. I’d say the same about Lasch’s notion of “therapeutic culture” and “narcissism” — it’s a devious way of dismissing the liberal desire for a fairer, more just society as nothing more than rank consumerism. In a sense, these essays came out of the same cultural milieu as the Hard Hat Riot or George Wallace bragging about running over antiwar protesters with his car: all represent a white conservative lament that everyone was getting a handout except them, that society was stacked against people who worked hard and kept their heads down, and that demands for the amelioration of suffering represented the destruction of Mayberryesque 1950s culture. What sets Wolfe apart from the others is his shrillness: even my students who watched Leave It To Beaver with approval thought Wolfe was being insulting.

A great piece on the 1970s!

One reason for the theme of ME Decade during the 70s was that the 70s was unprecedented and wild and there was an attempt to do new things with persona, discovery and so on and I think the newness was registered by Wolfe and Lasch as “Me” or “narcissism”. Although Wolfe is a conservative and Lasch was (partly) of the Left both men formed their ideas of what is right, just, correct, in the post New Deal climate which was probably not unlike Britain during the war years. Such a climate would have understood say, The Peace Corps but not, say, streaking or EST.

We forget now how truly radical the 70s were. Radical in ways that the labels of Left and Right are problematic. Indeed a lot of what we call “the 60s” only became widespread (as well as altered) in the 1970s. In rejecting both the traditional Left’s dreams of consensus and the Right’s ideas about some solid tradition and hierarchy, the 1970s cultures were about trying to find another way. People who think in terms of civic mindedness would have certainly interpreted the 1970s in the codes of the old order and would have disapproved.

Some writers have aimed to see past the older lens. Both Thomas Hine in The Great Funk and Bruce Schulman in The Seventies deal well with this. In many ways Age Of Fracture (a book that is otherwise mightily impressive) reminds me of a 1950s and 60s way of reading the 70s: Rodgers sees it as atomism, smallness etc. because he can’t see past the old dualism of individual and community.

If pseudo-intellectual journalists at The New York Times, The American Conservative, and other places can continue to simplistically characterize the 1970s as “the Me Decade,” then they can also continue to characterize the late 1960s counterculture as influential and destructive (not merely about personal satisfaction or flourishing, but about decadence and Dionysian longings), and then those same journalists/pundits can also justify the rise of the Christian Right in the late 1970s and through the 1980s. In sum, “the Me Decade” then makes some sense as a bridge period (a la Peter N. Carroll’s older historical narrative *It Seemed Like Nothing Happened* —i.e. it was just an unfocused transition period). – TL

Is there any possibility that Wolfe was invoking “ecstatic experiences” ironically, or was he fairly illiterate religiously? The experience of ecstasy (Gr., ex- + -stasis) involves “standing outside” of the self, the dissolution of the self in the overwhelm of something greater — a decidedly NON-narcissistic reordering of one’s self and one’s world. I’ll have to re-read Wolfe’s essay and reevaluate his use of religious ideas to bolster these claims.

Ben, What a great post! I think you’re absolutely right to identify anti-feminism as a common currency of this narrative, and I wonder how that should make us reconsider ostensibly feminist texts like Wendy Wasserstein’s “The Heidi Chronicles,” a play which absolutely buys into the Seventies-as-Me-Decade meme.

PS. I just discovered an amusing irony: the Clairol slogan that Wolfe quotes as evidence of the vacuousness of feminism is actually quoted on page 15 of The Feminine Mystique as evidence of the repressive power of the problem that has no name. She compares this ad campaign to the phenomenon of women refusing a cancer drug that was said to have “unfeminine” side effects.

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September 8, 2017

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The Me Decade

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WITH more than two decades of distance, the unpleasant details that shaped the 1970s have become as grainy as old newsreel footage. Presidential corruption, record unemployment and oil embargoes just aren’t as fun as the kitschy, Trivial Pursuit version of the period -- white disco suits, Billy Beer and the flaccid jowls of Tricky Dick. It’s almost as if, with the passage of time, we’ve willed Tom Wolfe’s blanket descriptor of the era -- “the Me Decade” -- to be true.

Yet the narcissism documented by Wolfe in his famous 1975 essay offers only a skewed partial view of one of the most disastrous periods in U.S. history. There was narcissism, to be sure, but it was born of fatalism. Americans had been riding the waves of postwar prosperity for nearly 30 years until a series of debilitating crises tripped up the nation’s confidence in the 1970s: We left Vietnam with our tails between our legs, our president was scrambling for his political life and the Middle East played chicken with our oil supply. Coupled with record-high inflation and unemployment, it indeed felt like the end of the world as we knew it. Therefore, we were going to go out feeling fine, be it through self-realization, self-medication or seriously bad clothes and hair. Cue Tom Wolfe.

Now a professor of history and public policy and public administration at George Washington University, Edward D. Berkowitz was a member of the President’s Commission for a National Agenda for the Eighties, a fancy title for a Carter administration-sanctioned think tank charged with providing a blueprint to fix the country. But the commission’s report was DOA: It was issued in December 1980, a month after the electorate cast its lot with California cowboy Ronald Reagan to save the nation from Carter’s dust cloud of doom and gloom.

In “Something Happened: A Political and Cultural Overview of the Seventies,” Berkowitz takes an ambitious stab at cataloging the decade’s political and cultural flashpoints, exhaustively connecting the dots from sundown in Southeast Asia to morning in Reagan’s America. He posits that the grim downturn of the decade didn’t really begin until 1973, when our boys were pulling out of Vietnam and the Watergate hearings had preempted soap operas and game shows in American homes. Berkowitz focuses on four major events that shaped the decade: Watergate, Vietnam, the oil crisis and the recession. The cumulative effect was systemic paralysis that both Republican and Democratic administrations were unable to fix. We became dependent on foreign oil, as shortages led to gas lines, rationing, higher prices and overall panic. “Americans felt themselves to be at the mercy of hostile foreign powers,” Berkowitz writes.

Even President Nixon’s perceived foreign policy triumphs -- detente with the Soviet Union and a highly choreographed trip to China (Berkowitz calls it “an eight-day miniseries that dominated the nation’s airwaves”) -- seemed more like elaborate distractions from the real problems at home. It certainly didn’t help Nixon, who resigned from office in 1974. But there would be no political healing. His covert illegal activities provoked the Democrat-controlled Congress to consolidate its power, which left the executive branch further weakened.

Perhaps a strong leader could have wowed the newly empowered House and Senate, but Gerald Ford was not that guy. Berkowitz believes Ford was doomed from the outset: “He inherited both the problems of the seventies and the solutions of the sixties.” But he also doomed his administration by pardoning Nixon and committing his own crucial gaffes, for which he was depicted as a clumsy buffoon by Chevy Chase on “Saturday Night Live.” Ford probably nailed shut his presidential coffin by insisting that there was “no Soviet domination in Eastern Europe” during a debate with his Democratic challenger, Jimmy Carter.

Carter was elected as a sort of anti-Nixon. A good man with a firm moral center, the former Georgia governor believed that the way to restore credibility to the White House was by telling the truth. During a 1978 speech on inflation, he spoke of “hard choices” and a “time of national austerity.” But, Berkowitz points out, America was a country that couldn’t handle the truth. Americans craved inspiration from their president, and when it wasn’t forthcoming, he says, evangelical Christians swooped in to fill the void. To Berkowitz, the rise of the Moral Majority signaled “the rebirth of the cardinal sins of ... intolerance and anti-intellectualism” from earlier in the century. Carter’s inability to secure the release of more than 60 Americans held hostage at the U.S. Embassy in Iran in 1979 served to reinforce the popular opinion that he was weak.

Only six years after Nixon’s resignation, the arrivals of the Reagan revolution and the Christian right signaled a fundamental shift from the liberalism of the 1960s, although, Berkowitz notes, that decade wasn’t completely in vain. Several movements with roots in the activism of the 1960s -- on behalf of women, gays, the physically disabled -- came to fruition in the next decade. Gays made the largest strides. Described as “a pernicious sickness” by Time magazine in 1966, homosexuality, Berkowitz writes, “became something like being Jewish or Italian. People recognized the category as describing a distinctive ethnic group” during the 1970s.

Throughout “Something Happened,” Berkowitz reveals a sharp acumen for boiling down the political and economic issues of that era. As a pop culture critic, however, he leaves a lot to be desired. The chapter on film feels slipshod and compromised, shoehorned in to make the book more accessible. Unfortunately, it offers little original insight, other than to reinforce opinions stated more cogently in dozens of other books, most notably Peter Biskind’s “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood.”

Likewise, Berkowitz’s section on television is mere channel-surfing. He mentions groundbreaking shows like “All in the Family” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” but gives others, like “Saturday Night Live,” a cursory mention, failing to underscore their importance as a cultural mirror, particularly in terms of the political events he describes.

His pop-culture chops notwithstanding, Berkowitz makes it perfectly clear that the 1970s were a seriously transformative decade in which the short-term inability of the government to respond to crises resulted in devastating long-term effects on the country. We squeaked through it, but here we are again. Although the author leaves it unspoken, the 1970s in many ways parallel the U.S. of today -- with another war that appears unwinnable, an administration embroiled in controversy and global tensions that have made some people nostalgic for the bomb-sheltered comfort of the Cold War. Which means “Something Happened” can be perceived as a very unsettling cautionary tale. *

Five Things to Know About Tom Wolfe

The late author had an undeniable influence on American writing

Kate Keller

Tom Wolfe, the 88-year-old journalist and best-selling author known for his immersive style, contrarian attitude and hallmark white suits, died Monday in a New York City hospital.

Wolfe leaves behind a literary legacy that details the lives of diverse milieus, from Cuban immigrants to New York City’s elite to the hippie counterculture . His novelistic nonfiction particularly helped expose the pluralism and peculiarities of American culture and usher in a new writing style that he called New Journalism.

Here are five things to know about the late author:

Before starting his career as a journalist, he aspired to play Major League Baseball

While the English degree Wolfe earned from Washington and Lee University in 1951 would arguably serve him further in the long run, as an undergraduate he dreamed about becoming a baseball star. A self-described "struggling middle reliever,” according to Matt Chittum at The Roanoke Times , Wolfe was talented enough that he earned a tryout with the New York Giants. But that was as far as he went. As The New York Times ’ Deirdre Carmody and William Grimes put it: “He did not make the cut.”

"I think if I could have been a baseball star at Washington and Lee, I probably never would have touched a typewriter again," Wolfe told Chittum in 1999. "Maybe it was a good thing for my family that things worked out as they did."

His major breakthrough came while reporting a story on custom cars in Southern California

While earning his PhD from Yale University in American studies, Wolfe got his start as a journalist writing for Massachusetts’ Springfield Union . He went on to write for a stint at the Washington Post . But he really began carving a space for himself in the profession when he was hired on at the New York Herald Tribune in 1962.

While writing for the New York Herald Tribune ’s brash Sunday supplement (which would later become New York magazine), Wolfe covered a Hot Rod and Custom Car show at the now-closed Coliseum in Manhattan. As Tim Grierson recounts for Rolling Stone , that afternoon ultimately inspired him to report on the broader hotrod culture taking hold on both coasts. Wolfe was especially struck by the absurdity he saw in the hotrodders he met, such as Dale Alexander, a custom car artist who had devoted his life (and sacrificed all financial security) for his niche craft. “He had starved, suffered – the whole thing – so he could sit inside a garage and create these cars which more than 99 percent of the American people would consider ridiculous, vulgar and lower-class-awful beyond comment almost,” Wolfe later wrote incredulously about Alexander.

After he pitched the idea to Esquire and traveled all the way out to Los Angeles to learn more about the culture, however, he experienced immense writers’ block. “I couldn’t even write the story,” he would say about the experience. “I came back to New York and just sat around worrying over the thing.”

With the encouragement of Esquire ’s managing editor at the time, Byron Dobell, Wolfe finally overcame his paralysis by simply typing out his notes. The resulting stream-of-conscious narrative would become Wolfe’s hallmark style. To his surprise, Dobell and the editorial staff loved the vivid, idiosyncratic technique. His piece would go on to become the titular installment of his first book of essays, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.

Wolfe is credited for popularizing now-common phrases, including “the Me Decade” and “the Right Stuff”

As the New York Times’ Dwight Garner reports , Wolfe’s innovative writing left quite the impact on colloquial language.

The titular phrase of his 1976 essay in New York Magazine, for instance, captured the zeitgeist of the era. Titled "The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” the piece details the narcissism that Wolfe observed in the era’s art, politics and popular culture. The "Me Decade" resonated with other cultural commentators of the time and quickly took hold among critics of ’70s-era materialism.

“The Right Stuff,” for its part, was the title of another Wolfe piece, this time a 1979 book about Cold War-era pilots researching rocket-powered, high-speed aircrafts. Though the phrase had previously appeared in W. Somerset Maugham’s 1927 novel Ashenden: Or, The British Agent , its appearance on the cover of Wolfe’s wildly popular book made it become a widely used metonym for the wherewithal and ambition needed for success.

Some of the most-well known “Wolfe-isms” that have entrenched themselves into the American vernacular include “pushing the envelope” and “ screw the pooch ,” both of which appear in The Right Stuff.

His signature white suit stemmed from his Virginia roots

Throughout his career, Wolfe was almost never seen or photographed without a sharp, if eccentric, three-piece white suit. The sartorial decision quickly became his hallmark – many even referred to him as “the man in the white suit.”

Wolfe’s affinity for this dapper look dates back to his early years as a journalist in New York City. The way Wolfe told it, Vanity Fair ’s Michael Lewis details , the writer came to New York City with only two sports jackets to his name. He quickly realized that he needed a suit to fit into the city culture. In his hometown of Richmond, Virginia, one wore a white suit in the summer, so that was what he picked out. To his cash-strapped delight, Wolfe found that the suit was thick enough to keep him warm even as the weather grew colder.

Later, he had the financial heft to purchase many suits. But he always stuck with the white ones that had turned into his signature fashion.

Wolfe's writing isn’t without its critics. He was charged with propogating racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic depictions throughout his career

One of Wolfe’s most criticized works is a 1970 piece published in New York Magazine about a Black Panthers fundraiser held in the legendary composer Leonard Bernstein’s penthouse. Entitled “Radical Chic,” Wolfe’s scathing, satirical portrayal of the event criticized Bernstein’s passion for civil rights as disingenuous “racial tourism.”

But many objected to his mockery of African-American vernacular and his references to gas chambers. One member of the Black Panthers infamously called him a “dirty, blatant, lying, racist dog.” Bernstein’s daughter later referred to Wolfe as a “callow journalist” who “[discredited] the left-wing New York Jewish liberals while simultaneously pitting them against the black activist movement―thereby disempowering both groups in a single deft stroke.”

Wolfe’s former editor Byron Dobell later told GQ ’s Ed Caesar that he had a falling out with Wolfe himself over the novella “Ambush At Fort Bragg,” the first installment of which was published in Rolling Stone in 1996. Wolfe’s first work of fiction since Bonfire of the Vanities , “Ambush” follows two journalists as they uncover the mystery of a gay soldier’s murder on a North Carolina military base. Critics of the novella said that Wolfe did not sufficiently condemn the killer’s violently homophobic motivations; for his part, Dobell called it “anti-Semitic, subtly, anti-black, subtly, and anti-gay, not so subtly.” Though Dobell said the two later reconciled, he told Caesar that he saw Wolfe as a “Puritan in Cavalier clothing”.

For his part, Wolfe firmly stood by his writing, telling the Guardian ’s Ed Vulliamy in 2004 that “the liberal élite hasn’t got a clue.”

“I was denounced because people thought I had jeopardized all progressive causes,” he said of his New York Magazine piece. “But my impulse was not political, it was simply the absurdity of the occasion.”

The portrait of Tom Wolfe, a photograph by Yousuf Karsh, will be on display at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in honor of the late author through June 3.

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Tom Wolfe: The “Me” Decade and the Third Great Awakening
Long, Long Read of the Week: Tom Wolfe on the 'Me' Decade in America
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Eaters of the Dead an Essay by Gene Wolfe

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The "Me" Decade and the Third Great Awakening
Published. 23 August 1976. ( 1976-08-23) " The 'Me ' Decade and the Third Great Awakening " is an essay by American author Tom Wolfe, in which Wolfe coined the phrase " 'Me' Decade", a term that became common as a descriptor for the 1970s. The essay was first published as the cover story in the August 23, 1976 issue of New York magazine [1] and ...
Tom Wolfe: The "Me" Decade and the Third Great Awakening
Tom Wolfe's The 'Me' Decade in the August 23, 1976, issue of New York Magazine: The new alchemical dream is: changing one's personality—remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing one ...
The "Me" Decade and the Third Great Awakening
The "Me" Decade and the Third Great Awakening. New York Magazine , August 23, 1976. The trainer said, "Take your finger off the repress button.". Everybody was supposed to let go, let all the vile stuff come up and gush out. They even provided vomit bags, like the ones on a 747, in case you literally let it gush out!
15 Great Articles by Tom Wolfe
Great articles and essays by the world's best journalists and writers. ... 15 Great Articles by Tom Wolfe. 15 classic reads from a journalistic pioneer, all free to read online ... Sunday morning in the hills of North Carolina. Cars, miles of cars, in every direction, millions of cars…" The Me Decade "The new alchemical dream is: changing ...
The New Man and the Me Decade
The New Man and the Me Decade. On Aug. 23, 1976, New York Magazine published "The Me Decade," a cover story by Tom Wolfe that eviscerated baby boomers as the most ludicrous, self-absorbed and ...
Tom Wolfe and the Age of Self-Involvement
Tom Wolfe's signature essay "The 'Me' Decade and the Third Great Awakening" is a joyful trip into the American maudlin, dateline 1976. It's narrated like a novel, the art form Wolfe denied its primus inter pares place in the literary quiver; that is, until he succumbed to it.
Tom Wolfe Is Dead but the 'Me Decade' Lives On (and That's a Good Thing)
Wolfe's enduring—and fundamentally libertarian—contribution to contemporary discourse is the insight at the heart of his 1976 New York essay that christened the 1970s as the "Me Decade ...
1970s: The Me Decade
1970s: The Me DecadeWhen journalist Tom Wolfe (1931-) surveyed the changes that had swept America in the past few years, he gave the decade a label that has stuck: "The Me Decade." Wolfe and others noticed that the dominant concerns of most people had shifted from issues of social and political justice that were so important in the 1960s to a more selfish focus on individual well-being.
Essays
Essays The Origins of Speech - Harper's Magazine, ... The following is taken from a seminar given by Tom Wolfe to students in the Graduate Writing Division at Columbia University on March 16, 1981. ... The "Me" Decade and the Third Great Awakening - New York Magazine, August 23, 1976.
Tom Wolfe Made Everyone Talk About Him
Not as famous as my favorite living writer at the time, Kurt Vonnegut, but famous enough that in Mr. Vonnegut's rave review of Mr. Wolfe's first book in this newspaper in 1965, he wrote ...
Tom Wolfe, Dead at 88, Had an Expansive Lexicon
Jim Cooper / AP. May 15, 2018. The paeans to Tom Wolfe, who died on Monday at the age of 88, inevitably extol his colorfully inventive use of language across his decades of fiction and nonfiction ...
From `The Me Decade' to `The Me Millennium': The cultural history of
Wolfe, Tom (1976) `The "Me" Decade and the Third Awakening ', New York Magazine, 23 August: 26—40. Google Scholar Wolfe, Tom (1977) ` The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening', Mauve Gloves and Madmen, Clutter and Vine .
The definitive works of Tom Wolfe
The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby, an essay collection and Wolfe's first book, documents the emergence of a new American aesthetic in the 1960s.In cities across the U.S., Wolfe ...
Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine
PS3573.O526 M3. LCCN 76-43968. Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine is a 1976 book by Tom Wolfe, consisting of eleven essays and one short story that Wolfe wrote between 1967 and 1976. [1] It includes the essay in which he coined the term "the 'Me' Decade" to refer to the 1970s. In addition to the stories, Wolfe also illustrated the book.
Whatever Happened to the "'Me' Decade"?
Though the phrase "The 'Me' Decade" may have been coined a few years earlier, its popularity took off following the publication of an essay by the journalist, novelist, and cultural critic Tom Wolfe entitled "The 'Me' Decade and the Third Great Awakening" that appeared in the August 23, 1976, issue of New York magazine. Read ...
The Me Decade
The Me Decade. By Erik Himmelsbach. Jan. 8, 2006 12 AM PT. Erik Himmelsbach is a writer and television producer. He is working on a book about the history of Los Angeles radio station KROQ-FM and ...
New Journalism: Tom Wolfe's pioneering legacy
Frustrated by the lack of revolution to come about in the 1960s, Wolfe labeled the 70s the Me Decade in a collection of essays that argued that a revolution of the self was the only thing left, an ...
Tom Wolfe Critical Essays
Essays and criticism on Tom Wolfe - Critical Essays. Select an area of the website to search ... Wolfe later coined the phrase "The Me Decade" to describe the 1970's, after having helped to ...
Five Things to Know About Tom Wolfe
Wolfe is credited for popularizing now-common phrases, including "the Me Decade" and "the Right Stuff" As the New York Times' Dwight Garner reports , Wolfe's innovative writing left ...
From `The Me Decade' to `The Me Millennium'The cultural history of
1970s, focusing on Tom Wolfe's article 'The "Me" Decade and the Third Great. Awakening' (1976) 3. ... subjects, but in this essay narcissism supplants this primary mother-love and.
Tom Wolfe
Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Jr. (March 2, 1930 - May 14, 2018) was an American author and journalist widely known for his association with New Journalism, a style of news writing and journalism developed in the 1960s and 1970s that incorporated literary techniques.Much of Wolfe's work was satirical and centred on the counterculture of the 1960s and issues related to class, social status, and the ...
Why were the 1970s dubbed the "ME Decade?"
The 1970s are called the "Me Decade" as a way of contrasting them from the 1960s. In the 1960s, Americans were involved in many different kinds of political and cultural movements. It was, of ...
Me Decade Tom Wolfe Analysis
Me Decade Tom Wolfe Analysis. 738 Words3 Pages. The focus of an individual on personal improvement was an idea that came to life in the mid 1970s. The exhaustion of alliance, whether with political parties, labor groups, or social classes, was leading people to turn inward for improvement. With this self-exploration came a sense of selfishness ...
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