Rich people and their discontents Tom Smith

I found the Tom Wolfe piece that Professor Rapport linked to fascinating and amusing and, since this is my blog too, I will not merely comment, but have a whole post of my own!

Tom Wolfe has made a career out of sending up the vanities of people who take themselves too seriously, including the fashionable lefties of the 1960’s (he invented the phrase “Radical Chic”) and the market animals of the 1980s (“Masters of the Universe” entered our vocabulary with his wonderful novel Bonfire of the Vanities.)  When you make human vanity your subject, especially among the upper reaches of society, you are always assured of a target rich environment.  It’s too bad Washington, D.C. does not have a Tom Wolfe.

Something I like about Tom Wolfe that becomes most clear, I think, in his novel A Man in Full, is that he is a morally serious observer of human lives.