The case of Jussie Smollett is, among other things, an accidental tribute to the life and work of Tom Wolfe. Wolfe, who died last year, annoyed progressives with his portrayal of white guilt and black radicalism in Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, and the contempt he expressed for identity politics and fashionable attitudes in other works.
Wolfe, who coined the term the ‘Me Decade’, delighted in mocking cultural narcissism. He argued that America was full of ‘status spheres’ in which politicians, artists, activists and others jockeyed for cultural capital.
One of his favorite targets was fashionable victimhood. In his first novel, for example, Bonfire of the Vanities, a strained yet arrogant bond trader is ruined after a cynical journalist and a demagogic Harlem preacher whip up mob-like outrage against him after he and his mistress strike a black man with their car while fleeing an apparent stick up.
Against the State: An ...
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The case of Jussie Smollett is so perfectly Wolfeian that I wouldn’t be all that surprised if somebody told me the whole story is an unpublished novel that he never finished.
The story goes like this. The chief character, Smollett, is a gay black man, ideally suited to victimhood status, his fame and his riches notwithstanding. He claims to have been attacked by two white man in ski masks who punched him, kicked him, poured bleach on him, tied a noose around his neck and screamed, ‘This is MAGA country!’ He is found still wearing the noose.
Such an exceptionally, theatrically sensational report should have raised eyebrows. Progressives, though, who have convinced themselves that the United States is on the brink of fascism, swallow it whole. Ellen ‘Political Sage’ Page, a Hollywood actress, appears on The Late Show to blame the alleged attack on Mike Pence and Donald Trump:
‘This is what happens. If you are in a position of power and you hate people, and you want to cause suffering to them…what do you think is gonna happen?’
Democrats, seeing another chance to distinguish themselves as anti-racists, condemn the alleged crime. Presidential candidates call it ‘a modern day lynching.’ Smollett appears on television in a tearful interview in which he wonders whether anyone would doubt his story were he not black and gay.
