Shallow, But With Sudden Depths

I subscribed to this sucker inadvertently (I think it may have been to help out the prep-school-aged brother of a clerk-intern this summer; we treat our interns differently than does Bill Clinton).

I am after all not the sort of man who gives a tinker's curse about overpriced 'personal care' gadgetry, how to hone one's six-pack abs into yet better definition (my motto is, Why go for a six-pack when you have a keg?), or how two perfectly built twenty-somethings of the appropriate respective genders can have an even better time fornicating than two perfectly built, gleefully amoral youngsters would be having to begin with. (If you detect a note of envy under the moralist's harrumphing, you are in fact wrong. Mostly.)

So why, pray, have I not passed the material directly from mailbox to the recycling bin? Would you believe, it's the articles?

Trapped uncomfortably amidst the fards, unguents, allegedly masculine parfumerie, insanely expensive toys, yoga techniques (trust me, they'd be far better off with the 1928 Prayer Book), tantric checklists (who comes up with this stuff?!), and 'extreme vacation' articles that bear obvious signs of adaptation directly from press releases, what did I find in two successive issues but - yes - Tom Wolfe, patron saint of acidly conservative W&L alumni writers, and GOP enfant terrible P. J. O'Rourke, by gum. Right there in front of God and everybody, cover stories by two of the best working essayists in the country. Cover stories.

Here is a monthly that suffers from every excess of our present Gilded Age: the unconscious homoeroticization of pop culture, idolatry of the body and its sensations, materialism that would have caused Thorstein Veblen to fail of words of condemnation, the unceasing, febrile pursuit of yuppification and acceptance, through single-malts and cigars, by aspiring company men possessed neither of blood nor breeding (the US as a whole tends to ask, 'What does he do?'; only in the South do we still ask, 'But who are his people?').

And yet there, in back to back issues, are Wolfe, the Man in the Ice Cream Suit, perforating modernism and post-modernism with the rapier of wit, and O'Rourke having at The Sensitive Nineties with a broadsword, a blackjack, a brickbat, and a bung-starter. Perhaps this is really their subtle plan: infiltrate the witless masses by promising them material comforts, then hit them with the Permanent Things and the Perennial Philosophy of Thomism.

Or maybe not; but I am willing to crawl through the dry sand of the rest of this otherwise appalling rag as long as these oases still exist. When they turn out to be mirages, I'll quit. By the way: you'll note I do recommend this as a gift for people who believe themselves trendy. This is partly because of my opinion of trendy types, and partly in hopes that Wolfe and O'Rourke will convert them.