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Entry: Requiem for a Tough Guy Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/requiem_for_a_tough_guy#9201 Post contents: First an aesthetic judgement. Success kills the American artist. One great novel is all that Irving, Cooper, Hawthorne, Twain, Sinclair Lewis, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Capote, and Styron ever wrote. Melville wrote one great novel and two great novellas. In the novel, only Henry James was consistently great American novelist. Mailer's first novel isn't so much great as it is very promising. The same could be said for the early Bernstein's music. The promise wasn't fulfilled. Killed by success and the desire for cheap celebrity by saying the outrageous. The"tough guy" in the American tradition is in fact an inheritance from one of the early immigrant groups: The Border-Backcountry people, misnamed the "Scots Irish" David Hackett Fischer has done a good job on discussing this group and their legacy. It certainly isn't a legacy from the other early immigrant groups, the Puritans, the Quaker-Pietists or the Virginia Cavaliers. It isn't a Jewish legacy as well. Mailer didn't know his real cultural ancestors. Second, a social judgement. The Borderer people, misnamed the "Scots-Irish", and the First American Blacks (pre 1808) were before 1960 forced into a certain social class because of historical circumstances. That social class was the "lower proletariat", rural and industrial; i.e. "unskilled manual labor". Yet this social class had in the 1950s fewer tattoos, no piercings, no gangs, no whoredom; had stable families, low divorce, low llegitimacy, low crime, relatively low substance abuse, and high church attendance. They also wanted education for their children and aspired to Bourgeois respectability, and only asked for a chance. After 1960, many of them, be they "Scots-Irish" or First Blacks, fell into the Lumpenproletariat, the class Marx hated the most, and began to manifest all the signs of that class's social pathology. Why this fall in social class in the 1950s after the 1950s is a story yet to be told. I suspect the reason to be that the ghetto and trailer-park thug first received legitimacy from intellectuals, and then the pop-culture, as a more "authentic" human being, or as a "rebellion" against the Bourgeois. Mailer in his thesis of "the white negro" (i.e. the white lumpenprole, the white ghetto thug) may have held started this legitimation. Shame on him. We are all now the victims, the Borderers and the First Blacks among them. I may not be in the Midge Decter fan club. She all the same has argued a correct point. The students of the 60s were not being rebellious. They were being obedient, obedient to the tradition handed to them by their professors -- the anti-Bourgeois tradition. The same could be said for other putative rebelliousness. Sent at: 2008 07 24