The Return of Radical Chic

Older readers might remember Tom Wolfe's New York Magazine article Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s. Wolfe was a master writer. He was the writer that journalists and opinion writers read. He was urbane, witty, and genteel but he was also subtle. He was subtlety on Prozac. He could gently slip a knife into his victim and it would go unnoticed for days until suddenly the hapless prey bled out all over the opinion pages of the major East Coast newspapers. There was usually little life left in the body by the time Johnny Carson delivered the coup de grace squarely between the eyes.
Wolfe didn't kill radical chic but he took much of the fun out of it. It's hard to look menacing when the whole country is laughing you as was the case of the Bay area, cop killing, Black Panther Party. Radical chic pretty much drowned in Mr. Carter's general malaise and his national crisis of confidence. Radicalism certainly wasn't chic under Reagan and didn't really recover until the ascendancy of Barack Obama. It's back in spades now. Fully metastasized as evidenced by the vanity license plates on the BMW belonging to one of the two young men from Kazakhstan who were retained by the FBI Saturday. Their female companion left in a car with diplomatic plates from an unknown country which is even more vexing than the vanity plates. Accomplices of terrorists get diplomatic immunity? Only under an Obama administration!
You don't own a BMW? You worked hard for 30 years, paid your taxes, raised your kids, and followed the rules and you still can't afford to tool around in a BMW like the kids from Kazakhstan? Maybe you don't have what it takes to be radical chic. How did this riffraff get here. Howie Carr has the answer;
" Obviously, no other country in the world wanted these sharia-crazed Stone Age Muslim terrorists."
I think the country is ready to move on from gun control legislation. If nothing else the brothers Tsarnaev have made the country forget Sandy Hook. The Senate gang of 8 is poised to dump another 12 million leeching future terrorists on the welfare rolls. Ask your senators if they can wait until you get your BMW.