"Radical Chic and Mau-mauing the Flak Catchers" is comprised of two short essays written by Tom Wolfe and first published in book form in 1970. While much has changed over the last three decades in America regarding the topic of race, the essays of this book are just as applicable now as they were when Wolfe wrote them.

"Radical Chic" is the story of a party thrown by Leonard Bernstein to raise money for the Black Panthers; specifically, for their legal defenses. Wolfe lets their own words and actions at this typical party be the objects by which these elite, Manhattanite, "limousine liberals" completely humiliate themselves. The lengths to which the Bernstein crowd goes--from whom they employ to what they wear--to remove anything that could possibly be viewed as "intolerant" is simply comical to almost anyone except for this crowd. As one who currently lives in New York City, this book was hilarious to read since any differences between the crowd Wolfe satirized in 1970 and the Manhattanite left-wing elitists of today, are virtually non-existent. As "Radical Chic" closes, this crowd is sent scrambling to distance themselves from the Panthers, not because the Panthers were anarchist street thugs, but because they are shown to be virulent racists, especially regarding anti-Semitism. Upper class Leftists, scrambling to distance themselves from the anti-Semitic comments of black leaders they once supported politically... my, how things have changed.

While "Radical Chic" is the longer and usually more famous of the two essays, "Mau-mauing the Flak Catchers" is Wolfe writing at a better, more colorful level than in "Radical Chic", where the essay's subjects do most of the talking. In "Flak Catchers" Wolfe again takes on the topic of angry minorities and their more affluent supporters in the white community. This time, Wolfe uses the racial melting-pot in San Francisco to show the numerous "impoverished" groups uniting to make themselves seen and heard by the local government. Wolfe demonstrates his perspicacity in putting a human face on these groups and objectively showing their personal motives for giving the white government office workers (the Flak Catchers), an occasional shakedown. But here too, Wolfe is not commenting on the minority group nearly as much as he is on the white, middle class, Northern Californians that seek to appease these groups at any cost. His cynical view of these people comes not from disagreement with their wanting to help the less fortunate, but from their complete phoniness, which ultimately blinds them to the acts and words of some nefarious characters.

As Wolfe writes in "Flak Catchers": "You'd turn on the TV, and there would be some dude you had last seen just hanging out on the corner with the porkpie hat scrunched down over his eyes and the toothpick nodding on his lips--and there he was now on the screen, a leader, a 'black spokesman,' with whites in the round-shouldered suits and striped neckties holding microphones up to his mouth and waiting for The Word to fall from his lips."

Exactly.

Take a half-cup of William F. Buckley, mix with a spoonful of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, stir in a dollop of David Horowitz, and leaven with a pinch of Hunter S. Thompson; boil, simmer, and stir----and you have Tom Wolfe, acerbic and acid observer of 20th century American society and possibly one of the keenest society writers since Ambrose Bierce. Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers is a slender little tome, with just 152 pages comprising two essays that cut to the quick of race and class relations in American society during the "Summer of Love." These two witty and mesmerizing little essays cut to the heart of the bizarre practice of society's elite espousing radical causes, and effectively capture and explain the seeming paradox of that strangest of modern beasts, the Limousine Liberal.

The first essay, "Radical Chic", is Wolfe's account of the high-society party thrown by New York Symphony conductor Leonard Bernstein and his wife for members of the Black Panthers, at the time a rising group of racialist incendiaries, revolutionaries, and terrorists. But as Wolfe points out, to the jaded, bored, decadent Central Park elite, they were exciting! Glamorous! Naughty! And highly fashionable, which is why the Thing to Do in New York High Society in 1969 was to throw penthouse parties for radicals.

What caused this? And why is it that so many of the affluent and wildly rich of today's American high society sport such radically leftist views, championing causes from banning fur to banning handguns to abolishing capitalism? According to Wolfe, it's a tactic of the newly rich called "nostalgie de la boue." Translated as "nostalgia for the mud", it takes the form of romanticizing the trappings, fashion, style, and even radical philosophies of the underclass in pursuit of irony, social aplomb, and prestige. While Wolfe doesn't mention this, even Marie Antoinette engaged in her own "nostalgie de la boue", meticulously recreating a 17th century French peasant village on the grounds of Versailles, where she and her ladies-in-waiting would play at being French peasant women.

"Radical Chic" takes the reader on a fascinating trip inside Bernstein's Park Avenue luxury apartment, but the reporter-style writing is actually drier than the more engaging "Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers." And best of all, "Radical Chic" offers a hysterical running dialogue between Lenny Bernstein and Black Panther Don Cox that Hollywood itself couldn't improve upon---with guest appearances by Barbara Walters, the Belafontes, and Otto Preminger!

"Mau Mau-ing the Flak Catchers" is more flamboyant, and, oddly enough, more interesting. "Mau-mauing" operates as a sort-of handbook for inner-city psychological against the "Man" (read: white middle-class social services bureaucrats) for fun, prizes, and most of all, money. Interestingly enough, Mau-Mauing (getting some friends and going down to the local social services office for a demonstration) played off white dread of the Racial Other, but Wolfe notes how effectively the largely white bureaucracy of the time used the system to co-opt the Revolutionaries. As Wolfe himself notes, "maybe the bureaucracy isn't so stupid at all. All they did is sacrifice one flak-catcher, and they've got hundreds, thousands."

Best of all, the second essay shows the early literary seedlings and ideas which would germinate in "Bonfire of the Vanities", including the idea of mau-mauing for fun and profit, wily social services operators who did (and do) understand the fear that white liberals have of appearing racist, the "pimp roll" and "pimp style" that infuriated Bonfire's young Assistant D.A., and even the Radical Chic parties that crop up in Bonfire and Wolfe's later novel, A Man in Full.

Both essays are fantastic reads, full of perceptive observations that illuminate how the Other Half was living the Summer of Love, and providing some insight into our own upside-down world of American race and class politics.

These are two long essays dealing with Race in America in the late 1960's. Radical Chic is the more famous of the two. Imagine the scene as Leonard Bernstien and his wife throw a cocktail party in their posh Manhattan Apartment with members of the Black Panther Party as the guests of honor. Wolfe was present at this strange event and offers a play by play of how Radical became all the Chic in the New York social scene...briefly. Bernstien's reputation received national tarnish, and Wolfe explains it all in his witty and insightful style. The book takes a snapshot of the late 60's and Wolfe deconstructs it to explain:White Guilt, New York Society, Zeitgeist, Media Frenzy and other assorted Social-Pop phenomena. Radical Chic is a fun read and will explain a lot about how the better half understood the radicalism of the 60's. I actually prefer the lesser known Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. Anyone who has ever been involved in interest group politics will howl with laughter as angry minority youths confront pasty white bureaucrats in Oakland in the late 60's. This essay doesn't have the celebrity glamour of Radical Chic, but a lot more people have worked on local race and diversity issues than have made the Manhattan scene with Lenny Bernstien and the like. This essay really explains the purest democratization that was the result of the radical politics of the 60's.