European Stars And Stripes (Newspaper) - November 25, 1987, Darmstadt, Hesse Page 10 the stars and stripes wednesday november 25,1987 Martin Gottlieb Public Good stems from private disclosures much has been said about the reasons judge Douglas Ginsburg had to give up on reaching the . Supreme court. Too much. Most columnists in the country have written that Youthful marijuana usage is a silly subject and that journalists and politicians should focus on More important things. Then Why Don t the columnists be cause the Only Way they can get inter ested in Trade deficits is to get stoned first surely not columnists read Public opinion just As politicians do and they sense the Public is getting tired of seeing career Hopes demolished by these stories about people s past behaviour and private lives. Hart Biden Bork Ginsburg. Celeste. Others have also been embarrassed Robertson Gore Babbitt. People Are starting to wonder whether there is something in our politics that will ultimately disqualify everybody from everything. Let s take Stock has any real injustice been done to anybody Joe Biden got what he deserved. The Guy does t know whether he s Jack Ken Nedy Bobby or a Coal Miner s son. The charges against him Are not nitpicking even if he is not the first politician Ever to crib from another. His plagiarism is Peculiar and outrageous and he is unfit to be president. Gary Hart got what he deserved. Though he knew his marital problems and social habits had become objects of widespread interest he carried on As if he did t care if he got caught. You Don t have to believe marital infidelity Dis qualifies one from the presidency to know Hart just blew it. Robert Bork lost his confirmation bid for the same reason he won the presi Dent s nomination he had written a lot of stuff that hard line conservatives loved. Most members of the Senate apparently disagreed with it heartily. If his history gets him the nomination and his George will history loses him the confirmation where s the injustice Ginsburg the Issue raised by his Epi Sode is not whether any marijuana use in one s youth permanently disqualifies one from High Public office. It is much Nar rower can a Law professor smoke dope at 33 and expect to be supported by conservatives for the supreme court at 41, at a time when conservatives Are making a very big political Deal put of the horrors of drugs especially if other aspects of the nominee s lifestyle give the conservatives other reasons to believe he is not one of them for a fellow with Ginsburg s past to run for office on his own would be one thing then he d be taking responsibility. But in this Case he was asking other politicians to pay the political Price to be seen As talking one Way about drugs and acting another for his own decisions. That s asking a lot. Most of the other Embarrass ing stories of the year have been one Day wonders. One said that one presidential candidate helped conceive a child before he was married another said that about another candidate. Others had to do withal Gore and Bruce Babbitt smoking mar Ijuana in their youths. If these kinds of stories were destroy ing careers that would be an outrage. As it is though the system is working. Indeed it s working better than we de serve. It might for example have destroyed the Hart or Biden candidacy late rather than Early which would have really been Messy. Worse yet one of the could have gotten elected and then been destroyed. Coi news off Vic Wolfe s Bonfire is news that will stay news literature has been defined As news that stays news. Tom Wolfe s crackling new novel the Bonfire of the vanities is being avidly read actually gulped Here and in Washington and elsewhere where news is devoured. The Best seller reverberates with subjects in today s news. However it also touches passionately on perennial themes that will give it stay ing Power. In its fullness its fascination with a City and social classes and the movements of Money and morals and in its capacity to convey and provoke indignation the novel is victorian even dickensian. Yet in its themes and characters it is As contemporary As this autumn s headlines. Bonfire is Wolfe Back where he belongs in the take no prisoners rambunctious Ness of his earlier books about abstract an Modem architecture and the Radical Chic politics of limousine liberals. His Pio agonist is Sherman Mccoy 38, Bond trader supreme and in his eyes master of the it is a shattering Story of total loss of Mastery when Mccoy and his mistress get lost in his Mercedes in the moonscape of the South Bronx and roaring away from a fracas with two Young Blacks fatally injure one of them. Mccoy becomes what the White elected District attorney of the Bronx desperately desires the great White defendant. There is As in Dickens a cartoon Quality to some characters and episodes such As the dinner Given by a social a Ray an impeccably emaciated woman who is this year s hostess of the and there is a Nouvelle cuisine restaurant serving veal Boogie Boogie rectangles of veal squares of spiced apples and lines of Pur cd walnuts arranged like Mondrian s painting Broadway Boogie but Wolfe s depiction of the processing of human raw material in the criminal Justice system is hair curl singly faithful to fact. And there is a ring of truth in the episode when a journalist asked a Bronx High school teacher if the injured boy was an outstanding Stu Dent and the teacher replies we use comparative terms but outstanding in t one of them. The Range runs More from cooperative to critics have a partial Point when they complain that Wolfe s fascination with clothes and furniture suggests an inability to Deal with things beneath surfaces. His strength is not the inner lives of his characters Al though he chillingly conveys the emotional vertigo of a respectable person suddenly on the receiving end of the criminal Law. However Wolfe s subject is the inner life of another kind of organism a Seething City. Besides one of Wolfe s themes is that too much of the tone of our time is set by people like Mccoy who have no stable selves Only a constantly shifting composite of elements acquired from the social environment. The class Wolfe most a sparingly describes lacks moral ballast and Wolfe leaves hovering in the air the implication that this May be both cause and effect of the immense new inexplicable wealth wealth related More to Sharp practices than to real productivity. Wolfe relies much More on his reporter s Eye a Gim let Eye than on any Muse to move his pen. So did another novelist who was first a journalist Dickens. Critics who Call the result a conservative novel Are More Correct than perhaps they understand. Certainly some conservative Hobby horses get Ridden hard. There Are withering sketches of trendy christians making guilt assuaging contributions to a Black clergy Man operator a self styled Street socialist who prof its handsomely from the government s racial spoils system and journalists peddling monkish compas but Wolfe also expresses an older deeper nobler conservatism that should disco fit those among to Day s conservatives whose philosophy is fully expressed by Market worship and getting Anu gaining. Wolfe casts a cold Eye on the ethos of overripe capitalism As exemplified by the frenzies of people swapping paper. You May laugh aloud then quickly wonder what it really funny about the episode when Mccoy flounders while trying to answer his six year old daughter s ques Tion daddy what do you do Wolfe is wickedly amusing about but not amused by the sight and sound of the greed storm in a Wall Street trading room the sounds of Well educated White men baying for Money on the Bond mar flocking to Wall Street to do that is Wolfe suggests unworthy of the sons of the great universities these legacies of Jefferson. Emerson. Thoreau William James. Inheritors of the Lux and the Bonfire is news that will stay news because Century hence readers will find preserved in it the Strong flavor of some unfortunately important slices of life in our time. Washngton Post writers group
