Brilliant, eloquent and funny: Tom Wolfe’s Rococo Marxists!

“From the very outset the eminence of this new creature, the intellectual, who was to play such a tremendous role in the history of the twentieth century, was inseparable from his necessary indignation. It was his indignation that elevated him to a plateau of moral superiority. Once up there, he was in a position to look down at the rest of humanity. And it hadn’t cost him any effort, intellectual or otherwise. As Marshall McLuhan would put it years later: “Moral indignation is a technique used to endow the idiot with dignity.” Precisely which intellectuals of the twentieth century were or were not idiots is a debatable point, but it is hard to argue with the definition I once heard a French diplomat offer at a dinner party: “An intellectual is a person knowledgeable in one field who speaks out only in others.”

Read the whole thing, as they say…

Perhaps I should give a second read to Nietzsche. Unfortunately, all I notice about Nietzsche is what Rococo Marxists taught me and what little gay Nazis of San Francisco Neo-Pagan scene spit out. Then again, it will probably be a while until I will read something other then a book on child-rearing.

…At least my late adviser was no Young Turk.