prem@eagle.UUCP (Swami Devanbu) (05/06/85)
(warning.. i am mad as hell...)
A view of the lower reaches of New York city high life, as seen
from the window of a cab driven by an unmentionable illegal
immigrant, as told by a yuppie congealed peramanently in a
coke-snorting pre-pubescent malcontentry. Not much more than
ennui, racism, homophobia, and excessive everything, turned out
in the best high-fashion new york slick talk.
The previous paragraph is a rough approximation of what the
books reads like. Seriously, bibliophilistines, the book sucks.
Sure, it's a page turner, I snorted it up in under 2 hours,
but it wasn't a good trip. It's cut with something, i can't
figure out what. It's a chatty slice of frenetic bacchanila
from the life of one "You", Fact Verifier, Dumped Husband,
Coke Devotee, and general blase-ist. The events, albeit
predictable, unfold engagingly in a style that's rather clever,
(in a pedestrian kind of way), with some toothsome vignettes of
Big Apple life thrown in.
But... all through it, there's the message that New York
is getting over run by (take a deep breath now) "spics, jews,
fairies, drug dealers, colored youths, lesbians" if it
weren't for whom, us WASP ivy-league yuppies and yuppettes
would be running the world just fine, thank you, instead
of spending our days and nights in a pleasant daze induced
by control substances. You know, I can really handle
all the "isms", sometimes even in good humor, but when it
seeks to insuniate itself from the pages of a book that
New York Times called "Engagingly modest, funny and well
balanced", I wonder if there's any hope in this country for
us colored immigrant professional types. This book, folks,
is The New Racism. All dressed up, ready to make big
bucks in the big city, party at nite, and hate those who have
the bad taste to be unlike us. We may have gone to business
schools in northern latitudes, and we may be terribly caught
up in our self-indulgence, and our pursuit of physical fitness
and corporate heights, but we can still manage a little hatred
for the coloreds now and then.
Makes you want to put on the Simon and Garfunkel and wish for
better karma in the good old days, when women didn't wear makeup
and men weren't gourmet cooks. I don't know want Jay McInnerny is
trying to tell about the world today. But it sure as hell ain't
my world. If it was, may be I wouldn't care so much about
Arms control.
Swami (Sorehead) Devanbu
{ihnp4,allegra,ucbvax}!eagle!prem