Wolfe on rhetoric, feminism, and astronauts
If you like reading Tom Wolfe (I prefer his nonfiction to his novels), then you might enjoy this lengthy interview he did with The National Association of Scholars, where he opines for his healthy Episcopal schooling in classical rhetoric:
When it came to academics, nobody could ask for a more rigorous and advanced curriculum. We all had to take a course in formal rhetoric in our sophomore year. Not just simple figures of speech such as simile and metaphor and oxymoron but also the really beautiful stuff, such as metonymy, litotes, anaphora, periphrasis-Dickens loved that one-epanados, as in “Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country,” tropes, figurae dictionis, figurae sententiae… And religion-every morning we had chapel, with prayers and hymns. You couldn’t beat the Episcopal hymns.
…how former Harvard President Larry Summers should have reacted when they lynched him for suggesting men and women were biologically different:
All he had to say was, “I cannot…believe…what I am now witnessing…members of the Harvard faculty taking a grossly anti-intellectual stance, violating their implicit vow to cherish the free exchange of ideas, going mad because a hypothesis that has been openly discussed for almost half a century offends some ideological passion of the moment, acting like the most benighted of Puritans from three centuries ago ransacking all that is decent and rational in search of witches, causing this great university to become the laughingstock of the academic world here and abroad, sacrificing your very integrity in the name of some smelly little orthodoxy, as Orwell called beliefs like the ones you profess.”
…and why Chuck Yeager was a better pilot than any of those terrific astronauts in The Right Stuff.













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back to top2 Comments to “Wolfe on rhetoric, feminism, and astronauts”
Summers should have realized that the left, especially the intellectual elite left, are the only ones that discriminate against anyone else today. Rights are only for the collective Borg of the left.
Their discrimination is always based on the same things. They are either afraid of the person who thinks differently than the collective evil Borg on the left so they must eliminate the one who could possibly harm them or their pride and ego gets its way with them and they think it is their right and duty to eliminate anyone who doesn’t think like them.
When ever you associate with the Borg, when they are in the majority, when they feel immune to criticism because they feel safe in their vast and overwhelming numbers and you are not part of their lock step collective – you will always die, go bankrupt or both. Your resistance is futile.
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I can understand why there’s only one comment so far. This is heavy stuff. It prints to 13 pages,and he covers a lot of ground.
The article is interesting and well worth reading. I wouldn’t try it on-line.
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