a Larry Osborne conversation with Mark Driscoll from 2016: Part Six: Mark Driscoll’s resignation—the BoAA expresses surprise, and among the BoAA members was Larry Osborne

http://web.archive.org/web/20141016105922/https://marshill.com/2014/10/15/pastor-mark-driscolls-resignation

Pastor Mark Driscoll's Resignation

On Tuesday, October 14, Pastor Mark Driscoll submitted his resignation as an elder and lead pastor of Mars Hill Church. The Board of Overseers has accepted that resignation and is moving forward with planning for pastoral transition, recognizing the challenge of such a task in a church that has only known one pastor since its founding. We ask for prayer for the journey ahead.

As is well known, inside and outside of Mars Hill, Pastor Mark has been on a leave of absence for nearly two months while a group of elders investigated a series of formal charges brought against him. This investigation had only recently been concluded, following some 1,000 hours of research, interviewing more than 50 people and preparing 200 pages of information. This process was conducted in accordance with our church Bylaws and with Pastor Mark’s support and cooperation.

While a group of seven elders plus one member of the Board of Overseers was charged with conducting this investigation, the full Board of Overseers is charged with reaching any conclusions and issuing any findings. In that capacity, we believe it appropriate to publicly mention the following:

1. We concluded that Pastor Mark has, at times, been guilty of arrogance, responding to conflict with a quick temper and harsh speech, and leading the staff and elders in a domineering manner. While we believe Mark needs to continue to address these areas in his life, we do not believe him to be disqualified from pastoral ministry.

2. Pastor Mark has never been charged with any immorality, illegality or heresy. Most of the charges involved attitudes and behaviors reflected by a domineering style of leadership.

3. We found some of the accusations against Pastor Mark to be altogether unfair or untrue.

4. Other charges had been previously been addressed by Pastor Mark, privately and publicly. Indeed, he had publicly confessed and apologized for a number of the charges against him, some of which occurred as long as 14 years ago.

5. We commend Mark for acting upon the vision God gave him to start Mars Hill Church and for his ministry of faithfully teaching the Word of God for the past 18 years. We commit to pray for him, for Grace, and for their children as they transition from ministry at Mars Hill Church.

We would ask for patience as we now make plans for the first transition of pastoral leadership in the history of Mars Hill Church. We have asked Pastor Dave Bruskas to serve as the primary teaching pastor while we work on long-term plans and decisions. Our elders and board members will work closely with the church staff to support the ongoing operations of Mars Hill in the days and months ahead.

Finally, Mark Driscoll was not asked to resign; indeed, we were surprised to receive his resignation letter. [emphases added] While he can speak to his decision as he chooses, we would point to just two things from his letter. He noted that he had concluded “it would be best for the health of our family, and for the Mars Hill family, that we step aside from further ministry at the church.” Secondly, he specifically wanted to convey “to the wonderful members of the Mars Hill family, how deeply my family and I love them, thank them, and point them to their Senior Pastor, Jesus Christ, who has always been only good to us.”

Mars Hill Board of Overseers

Michael Van Skaik

Larry Osborne

Jon Phelps

Matt Rogers

So the summation of the resignation was that the Board of Overseers did not ask Mark Driscoll to resign and were surprised to receive his resignation letter.  Among the Board of Overseers was, as noted, Larry Osborne.

What was shared with Mars Hill attenders in the wake of that resignation was the following, at least at one campus:

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/10/19/mars-hill-church-board-of-elders-mark-driscoll-resigned-instead-of-enter-restoration-plan-to-deal/

http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2014/10/Alex-Ghioni-Announcement.m4a

 starting about 3:45

The investigation of formal charges against Mark Driscoll has revealed patterns of persistent sin in the three areas disclosed in the previous letter by the Board of Overseers. In I Tim 5:20, it requires that an elder be rebuked for persistent sin. Our intention was to do this while providing a plan for his eventual restoration to leadership. The Board of Elders in agreement with the Board of Overseers are grieved, deeply grieved, that any process like that was lost to us when Mark Driscoll resigned in position and left the church. [emphasis added] Now is the time to move on and consider what God is calling us to next as a church as we participate in Jesus’ mission to make disciples in His name. Today begins a new chapter in the history of our church which has proceeded in one direction under one leadership for many years now, but I want you to understand this, God is our Father. That does not change. Jesus is the chief shepherd of the church and that has not changed.

What changed, of course, was that Mars Hill soon dissolved. What else would seem to change was the explanations of what, exactly, transpired that led to Mark Driscoll’s resignation.

a Larry Osborne conversation with Mark Driscoll from 2016: Part Seven: in the 2015-2017 post-resignation era new stories emerge about how and why Mark Driscoll resigned

But what Robert Morris shared at the Gateway Leadership and Worship Conference days after the announcement of Mark Driscoll’s resignation was the following:

http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2014/10/Transcript-Robert-Morris-Mark-Driscoll.pdf

Transcript of Robert Morris and Mark Driscoll from the Gateway Leadership + Worship Conference

 on the evening of Monday, October 20, 2014, as broadcast live via DayStar Television:

Robert Morris: Uh, it was publicized that we cancelled him; that’s not true, we did not cancel. I’m speaking of Mark Driscoll. We did not cancel him. He and I decided together uh that he was going to step out of ministry for a season and get some healing. [emphasis added]

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2015/05/13/transcript-of-mark-driscolls-speech-at-the-thrive-leadership-conference-2015/

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wYBTnRpPHRb8N1nqtgP2FcHcdnBeMIqCYy2SyQCEWBg/edit

Transcript | Mark Driscoll | Thrive 2015-05-01

See Links to Timestamps at the end of this doc. [these omitted here]

...

[6:34]

It finally came to the point where God released my wife and I from our responsibility to ministry. He spoke to us audibly. It wasn’t what we were expecting. It wasn’t what we had agreed to. We were both pretty shocked and the announcement was going to come out that week. [emphasis added] And, uh, our server, our e-mail and things apparently were hacked and there was no way to get anything done without it being a public situation. And so the Board, which are good, godly people in authority, which I appreciate -- they released a statement earlier than we were anticipating, so um, but that meant, and I agree with that decision, I’m not critical of it.  But that meant that I hadn’t told my kids that I had resigned and they were in school, taking test, it was a test week, …. we threw some stuff in a bag and ran to school to grab the kids and within minutes it was on TV, I think it was on CNN.  [emphasis added]  We pulled the kids out of school, and they already knew because of social media -- media moves so fast.  So we told them they couldn’t go back to the house for a few days so we jumped in the car and went to a hotel and it was just kind of a emotionally wrecked.

We pulled the kids out of school, and they already knew because of social media -- media moves so fast. [emphasis added]  So we told them they couldn’t go back to the house for a few days so we jumped in the car and went to a hotel and it was just kind of a emotionally wrecked.  We’d served in that city for 20 years.  Founded that church in our living room. And served it for 18 years.  (loud applause) Baptized somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 people. (audible amens from crowd).

[8:13]

So, we’re sitting with the kids explaining to them that dad had resigned and that we were going to continue forward and that God had released us very clearly.

As we have seen, that board included Osborne.  Now what Mark Driscoll shared with Brian Houston in a 2015 interview was the following:

http://hillsongchurchwatch.com/2015/07/14/transcript-of-brian-houstons-nice-interview-with-mark-grace-driscoll-2/

(39:32-39:44)

Mark Driscoll: “I never got to say goodbye to the church and to the people, um, and so what went public was uh, actually the resignation letter that went to the legal governing board that was in authority over me. [emphasis added] Um, and so, um, I uh, I know under the circumstances that there wasn’t a way to do that would’ve been clean or easy. I don’t have any criticism of the board. I think for the people it, it meant there wasn’t closure and I didn’t, we didn’t get to say anything.

And so, we didn’t expect to resign I met with the board there was a whole list of things that were charged by current former leaders and there was an internal governance struggle, and threats of legal action, and it got very complicated. And a lot of it was anonymous and through the internet so you don’t know who’s saying or doing what. And so I invited the board to do a full examination interview anybody anything, and we would submit to whatever verdict that they determined. [emphasis added]

Um, and when I think about 8 weeks we met Friday and Saturday, October 10th and 11th, I remember because the 11th was my birthday. And so Grace and I were present with the Lord [Board].[emphasis added] And they said, uh, we see in your history of leadership less in more recent years, more particularly in the past, pride, anger, and domineering leadership style. That would be the three exact words they used. We don’t see anything disqualifying, these are areas we want you to grow, we want you to return to leadership of the church soon. They wanted to do some clean up internally. We want you back on January 4th in the pulpit give you time to heal things to cool down and for some changes to be made. We agreed to that. I sent in a go forward plan and then we went home to have birthday cake with the kids.

Um, I think it was on Monday night I was in the bedroom Grace was in the living room and so we had told the board and told the kids you know, come back and was done preaching and love and serve and fix what was a struggling church.  And uh, and God had provided a way for us to do that as volunteers and so I was to come back as volunteers. And then on that Monday night I was in the bedroom and Grace was in the living room. And um, he spoke to me and he spoke to her in a supernatural way [emphasis added] that neither of us anticipated or expected. And so Grace walked in and she said, “I feel like the Lord just spoke to me and said what we were supposed to do.” [emphasis added] And I was like, “I thought the Lord just spoke to me and said what we were supposed to do.” It’s not what we wanted, it’s not what we agreed to, it’s not what we planned for, and so I asked her well what did the Lord say to you because I didn’t want to influence her and so she said, uh, she said we’re” (39:45-42:42)

Grace Driscoll: “We’re released.” (42:43)

Brian Houston: “We can take a moment.” (42:52)

Mark Driscoll: “So, she said well what have you heard so I can hear it. “Well the Lord revealed to me that, you know, a trap has been set, there’s no way in which to return to leadership.” And I didn’t know what that meant or what was going on at the time. And um, I said, he said well release too we need to resign. [emphasis added] And so, um, you know, this is not what we anticipated, and uh a lot of people thought you know, maybe he’s got another plan, or, we didn’t. We didn’t know what we were doing. And Grace fell to the floor and she was just sobbing uncontrollably and I’ve never seen my wife like that she was devastated. Um, so we prayed and slept on it decided that we would make sure we got this right, and uh.”

Grace Driscoll: “Speak with wise council.”

Mark Driscoll: “Sought the pastors of those we trust and sent in our resignation in on that, it would’ve been that Tuesday, yeah, and resigned.” (42:53-43:57)

Brian Houston: “So there is a lot of grief, uh, delusion of the church [Inaudible]” (43:58-44:00)

So in this account Mark Driscoll recounted that the investigation taken up by the Board (there’s some potential ambiguity as to which board(s) were specified) was at his initiation.  It may be the BoO set up a BoE to investigate things on behalf of the cumulative BoAA for those already familiar with the ins and outs of Mars Hill governance. 

What is crystal clear is that Mark Driscoll said that God told his wife they were “released” from ministry at Mars Hill.  Driscoll claimed that he heard a trap had been set.  But whatever that trap was has never been defined.  Since by Mark Driscoll’s own account the investigation was his own idea the investigation itself and its results don’t seem like they could have been the trap.  The nature of the trap isn’t really possible to explain and with the mediation of cameras and microphones it’s not even clear if there’s ever supposed to have been an explanation.  The interpretation could remain as open-ended as possible for anyone hearing the statement to fill in the blanks. 

Given how many stories Mark Driscoll has shared about what happened that led up to his resignation it seems worthwhile to note something he said in an interview with Sheila Walsh and Randy Robison in 2017.

from the April 6, 2017 interview Mark Driscoll had with Sheila Walsh and Randy Robison

 http://lifetoday.org/assets/files/4-6-17e-SWRR-wDriscoll.pdf

We took some time off just to heal up. I signed a non-disclosure agreement so you're not going to talk about it, which was fair and reasonable and I agree with. [emphasis added] And just decided to spend time as a family to heal up, to meet with wise counsel, to learn what we could learn and to see what the Lord had for the next season of our life.

It is with all these stories in mind that we can now finally look at an interview conducted by Larry Osborne with Mark Driscoll in 2016 that has been available to view online for at least a year.

a Larry Osborne conversation with Mark Driscoll from 2016: Part Eight: Larry Osborne interviews Mark Driscoll in 2016 about his resignation and his account that 30 some former leaders weren’t willing to reconcile with him

https://leadnet.org/videos/

https://leadnet.org/video/400-gathering-day-2-session-1/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzhEwT7xLsI

uploaded November 16, 2016

092816 400 Gathering Session 1

Interview with mark Driscoll starting at 39:35

LO:  It's not been a, a, great kind of couple of years for high profile pastors in some situations. And your situation at Mars Hill was probably as visible in social media and all that as anything that people have gone through.

So we just wanna take a little time now and, and not so much deconstruct kinda what happened, but what God has taught you through that situation,  [indistinct] you can help us to learn,  things about, maybe, being helpful to brothers and sisters that go through a rocky time.

40.12

Many of us, nobody expects to go through one of those, they just kinda happen, like, dinner at Denny's--you just, end up there. ...

40:26

But Mark, first thing ... how's Mark doing?

40:36

Driscoll:  ... it's been a hard one to answer. I guess the answer that I started giving, not to be super spiritual, but, uh,  "I'm at peace and I believe I'm in God's will." 

And so I've even actually started asking pastor friends of mine, not "How are you doing?" but "Are you in God's will?" because sometimes being in God's will is not the easiest place to be but it's the peaceful place to be. So I don't know HOW I'm doing but WHERE I'm at is pretty good and I think that in the season that we have been in the fatherhood of God has been profoundly, ah, real to me.  Uh, I kinda feel like a son who, as long as [he] sticks close to his dad is gonna be okay, and, better than okay, he's gonna be better. 

41:25

LO: Looking back, if there was ONE that you could have a do-over on, [a] mulligan, what would that be?

41:32

Driscoll: Going into ministry [audience laughs]

41:47

Yeah, no, I say that half joking, half honestly. You know, somebody once said that going into ministry is handing God a blank sheet of paper that he gets to write into your life and I think that's true.  I think, uh, after I pulled back from public ministry and took a season of learning and really connecting with Grace and the kids because it was, as you know, and thank you for being a good pastor to us through that season.  It was just a very difficult time for the family.

42:16

So, you know, my first ministry is to my wife and my kids, and then we had an opportunity to travel some, and to meet with other pastors and leaders--not teach or be on the stage, just take notes and learn and listen and kind of  treat it like an opportunity to fill in the gaps.

42:34

I met with one particular pastor. (I won't namedrop. A lot of people were very kind to me.)  He said, "A church really comes down to two things." He said, "Governance and relationships." and he said: "If the governance is bad the relationships can save it. If the relationships are bad the governance can straighten them out. If the governance is bad and the relations aren't strong then you've got a real problem."  And I believe there was a lot of wisdom in that.

43:05

So, if I had anything to do over again it would for certainly be governance and relationships, `cause sometimes as leaders we can be so much about the windshield and what's next and the opportunities we're not spending much time in the rear-view mirror on where we're vulnerable, and what things from the past and so far as policy, relationship and conflict that have not been tended to they can find themselves suddenly thrust into the future.

So, yeah, I would say those issues of governance and relationship and those become the pot in which the ministry grows and if the pot's not right eventually the plant's not healthy.

LO: The pot's a little more on the relational side as I think, for this group, we've all kinda worked through kinda governance issues. People who kinda followed your story know part of it is governance. but relationally, what'd you do differently if you had that moment again.

43:57

Driscoll:  There's a lot. There is an interesting book, ah, called Necessary Enemies by Henry Cloud that I found particularly helpful and I think it's in chapter 7 he talks about three kinds of people. And you're a proverbs, wisdom kind of guy. He talks about wise, foolish and evil. And so he says that you treat different people differently and they will determine how they will be treated by their conduct or their character. So the WISE people, you give them more time, more energy, more access, more vulnerability because they'll be a gift to you and you give to them, they'll act upon it, and it'll increase their wisdom like proverbs says it should.

44:34

Then there's foolish people and you're always having the same conversation; they want to blame-shift and change the subject and argue and fight and get others involved and make a lot of drama. And with foolish people he said you LOVE them but, ultimately, it's consequences so that they'll hopefully move toward wisdom and get some course correction.

44:50

And then he says there's evil people.  And evil people, he says, you know, what they need is lawyers, guns and money and that with evil people, if you treat an evil person the way you treat a wise person (you give them more time, more information, more access, more vulnerability) they're just going to use that to hurt and to harm you and your ministry and your family. And so sometimes what evil people do, they will get foolish people to then make demands on their behalf that they be treated as wise, and so, for me, it would be wanting to pursue, first of all,  wisdom by God's grace and that's a lot of the wisdom literature

45:31

and a lot of times we think about being RIGHT (and you can be theologically right and still not be relationally wise) and then how to encourage people that are foolish or in ourselves or in myself there's aspects , there's components, there's parts of my life I'm still foolish. And we all have those areas and seeking wise people in those areas. And then with evil people it's trying to teach the wise  and the foolish that, you know, we love those people and we seek good for them but Jesus didn't say to Judas Iscariot, "If we could just do coffee every Tuesday  for the next fifteen years we could really come to an agreement." You know, wear matching sweatshirts, ride a tandem bike and tell a reconciliaton story. He said, "I know what you're gonna do. You're evil, so you need to go do that now."

46:16

And I think as a leader the hard part is we have to, at some point, be the umpire in certain relationships. Is this person wise, are they foolish, are they evil? How am I behaving? Am I behaving in a way that is wise or foolish or evil? How are WE behaving as a team? Are we wise? Are we foolish? Are we evil?  And I think when it comes to relationships it's first really understanding, "What kind of person am I dealing with?" and then "How am I behaving?" and then make sure I get over to the wise side and then appropriately ascertain where they're at and how  I interact with them. And it's probably more complicated.

46:45

But it's been, it's been helpful for me.

And wise people are not always the smartest, the most gifted. There's teachability and humility and so everyone can be wise according to Scriptures if they allow the Holy Spirit to bring some humility and that includes me and others as well.

47:04

LO: As you look back, in terms of those three things; prior to reading that, being in the zone of, "Lord, teach me, I've got a lot of stuff to learn; what would you say you did RIGHT, or NOT right not knowing those three things in terms of just treating conflict, I mean there was a time (it's no newsflash to you or anybody in this room) Mark would be known for wanting to be right far more than wanting to be anything else. So talk a little about how those changes took place.

47:39

Driscoll: I heard another leader one time say, "You can either make a point or you can make a difference but to make a differences takes a relationship."  Points are easy and in the age of the internet every 25-year old guy thinks he's Martin Luther and he's gonna nail his 95 Theses to the internet Wittenberg church door because everybody in the Church got it wrong until he was born and we're all glad you're here because we've been waiting for messiah. 

48:06

And what happens is, uh, is that when you're young and idealistic, at least for me, I was making a lot of points and the result is that the relationships tend to be weak and don't make a difference. You know, I think it's in Luke 6:40 Jesus says that fully trained students become like their teachers.  You know the second and third generation is always a more extreme version of the first. And so if you're, uh, you're someone who is all about making a point, not about making a difference, well by the third generation you've raised up Pharisees and they've all got clipboards criticizing you.

48:42

And if you're all about making a difference but you're not really teaching or making a point, by the third generation they're not even Christians, they're just out helping poor people but not alleviating the worst suffering of all which is eternal suffering.

48:55

So I thought he made a good observation. It's not just about making a point, it's about making a difference and sometimes making a difference takes the long, hard route of a relationship.  And, you know, when you're a preacher, a teacher, a writer, you're a leader, you have a platform it's a LOT easier to make a point than it is to make a difference.

49:10

LO: Definitely.

So, what, you appear, at this point (at least to me, and I have been able to walk through a lot of this time with you [Driscoll says "yeah"]) to be, um, humbled; kinda Mark 2.0 in some areas and as you've gone through that what really--and you really haven't been bitter or broken, I mean, you've been more broken than bitter, let me say that in English.  You've not really been bitter at any particular point. What did you learn, because the attacks were particularly public and therefor embarrassing and all of that--you mentioned the other day that you'd gotten pretty good at awkward in terms of your conversations. 

Driscoll--yeah, I have a master's degree in awkward

49:58

LO: So, what did you learn that could help us, because every one of us are gonna find ourselves to SOME degrees in those public attacks, the staff attacks,   that kind of thing, navigating that kind of thing

50:10

Driscoll: um, I met with thirtysome former leaders that would be sort of in the unhappy, disgruntled, frustrated category and almost every single conversation post my-resignation and transition, it's almost like it was a script, and they said the same thing which, I don't know if they were processing together, it's just where it ended up.  And it was, "I can't forgive you because you're not repentant."

And I'd say, "Well, I apologized" and I would give the dates that I apologized with them, one, on multiple occasions I said, "Did I ever do that again?"

"No, you didn't not but I can't forgive you because you've not repented."

I asked, "Well, what does repentance look like?"

50:54

And over and over and over it was repentance--forgiveness, rather--forgiveness is at the END of the process, not the beginning and then I will JUDGE you and I can't forgive you until you're repentant and that means that I kind of sit in a God seat, and I need to give it a lot of time, and I can't forgive you until I believe you have come to full repentance as I see it. [emphasis added]

51:18

And I would wholeheartedly disagree with that. That is actually one of the fundamental theological issues that we had ongoing conflict underneath the church. There were some books that came in, there was some teaching, and I taught AGAINST that, I said I believe that forgiveness in ANY relationship is at the FRONT.  Good luck handing this [forgiveness last praxis] to a marital relationship. "I will not forgive you until I feel you are repentant and I've seen the signs of repentance over the course of X number of years and conditions."

Well, tell the couch, "hello."  And, you know, it's gonna be a long, hard route.

51:49

And so I did a full year of Bible study on forgiveness and I found that almost every time that the Bible talks about forgiveness, unforgiveness or bitterness, in that same orbit it talks about the demonic.  So Ephesians 4, "forgive one another, don't give the devil a foothold."  Paul tells the Corinthians, "Satan will not outwit us because we're not unaware of his schemes." You mentioned Matthew 18 in your talk. The story of the jailor that he's in torment, and I believe that is demonic torment. I believe the jailor is probably Satan in Jesus' story.

52:22

The question is, once we are hurt--and there's a difference between hurt and harmed. It's important to note that--once we are hurt we can either choose bitterness or forgiveness. As soon as we choose bitterness what we've determined is we will live in a cell where we are demonically tormented because Satan and demons have never forgiven anyone; they're never forgiven of anything; and as soon as we say, "I do not do forgiveness" what we're saying is, "I DO do the demonic." And I believe that Satan and demons, that the foothold of all the demonic is in the realm of unforgiveness.

52:57

And so what happens then is, you're in a jail cell of bitterness and hurt--the worst day becomes your every day; you take the worst of your past into your future; and the question is, "Do THEY have the key by repenting or do YOU have the key by forgiving?" and I believe that the Bible is clear that we hold the key to get out of our own cell of demonic torment and bitterness and frustration and living with the unending loop of in our mind of the worst parts of our life 

53:26

and so, honestly, for me it was a long Bible study with the family--we couldn't go to church for a long time so on Sunday mornings we'd do that as a family, and did a long Bible study on forgiveness--[I] needed my children to forgive me for things I'd said and done to contribute; we needed to forgive others for things they'd said and done to contribute; and I want to make sure there was not a root of bitterness in my heart or in my family because the Bible is clear in Hebrews that eventually that grows up to defile many and all it takes is bitterness in one heart to destroy an entire church

54:00

and so ('m not saying I'm particularly skilled at forgiving but) I just see that, that it IS demonic [unforgiveness], that it HARMS those who don't forgive,  and it allows us to have empathy for those who are hurting and to pray that they would come to experience the kind of forgiveness that the Lord forgave them because those who are forgiven are to be forgiving and when we STOP that flow I believe we stop the flow of the Holy Spirit in our life and I believe we stop the flow of the Holy Spirit in our relationships. [emphasis added]

54:30

LO: And I commend the work of the Lord in you in that, walking through this time. I have personally experienced you living out much of that, you know, in the mirror, asking, "What do I do to get rid of my bitterness?" and made sure the Lord can use me and we look forward to the Lord using you in the next few minutes as you share with us--

54:55

Driscoll: and I want to thank you for being a good pastor to Grace and I. We love you. We love you very much. Thank you.

semi-incubation

much as I'm loving the blogging-through-Koshkin's 24 preludes and fugues series that's going to be temporarily on hold.  There's a few reasons.  One is that we're hitting parts of the cycle where a guitarist has to sit down and do some score work and on-instrument work.  That will take some time.

And ... there's a book that's out that we're going to discuss by way of review here just like I said we would at the end of last year, Jessica Johnson's book Biblical Porn.  Got a copy of the book and need to read through it and write that review.

And ... there's an interview by someone associated with Driscoll over the years that I heard recently that I wanted to get to, a Gerry Breshears interview about what can be learned in the wake of the demise of Mars Hill.  It'll take some time to get to that because of the book stuff, but that's another thing I hope to get to.

And ... there's another one but that's not something that really needs a ton of discussion at the moment.  It's been a few years since the resignation and it's going to be interesting to go through interviews that in some way broach the subject of the resignation and transitions.  We'll try to get to those but not everything has been put in places where it'd be easy to find. 

National Association of Scholars, a conversation with Tom Wolfe, with a quote about men finding themselves at jobs they're at a loss to describe to their children in bureaucracies

I have to admit I didn't even finish A Man in Full. My fandom of Wolfe went right up to Bonfire of the Vanities and stopped there. But sometimes there's stuff he's discussed in the last few decades that might be worth quoting on the week he's passed:

https://www.nas.org/articles/A_Critic_in_Full_A_Conversation_with_Tom_Wolfe

…

 

Iannone: What was your dissertation on?

 

Wolfe: It was on the League of American Writers, which was a Communist front. That was a very hazardous subject for a dissertation at that time. We are talking about the 1950s, when the debate over McCarthyism was still going strong. Most of the major writers in the country belonged to the League from 1935 to 1939. On the surface it was merely one of many anti-Fascist organizations and had nothing to do with the Communist Party directly.

 

Iannone: Or it said that it didn’t or you believed that it didn’t?

 

Wolfe: Oh, no, a Communist fraction ran it. The party used the word “fraction,” not “faction.” I did a lot of reporting for that dissertation. I interviewed the principals, Communist and non-Communist, and they told me exactly how it was done. You should read it—or maybe you shouldn’t. Talk about a dry piece of sociology. It dealt with political issues only insofar as they affected how the fraction ran the front. That dissertation is so diligently dull and puritanically objective, it’ll dry up your skin and make your teeth fall out. But I got my Ph.D. My sole interest was in how the Party could turn writers, people who pride themselves on their independence, into what they called “a manipulable mass.” I combed through census figures, biographical yearbooks, newspaper files, and found out that—this was no surprise—most lived in New York and Los Angeles but came from other places all over the country. They were adrift socially. Their whole social life depended on friendships with other people in the same line of work. [emphasis added] Offer them an organization devoted to a cause they believe in, namely anti-Fascism, and it wasn’t all that hard to manipulate them…in behalf of Soviet foreign policy.

…

 

See that part jumps out at me, as a former member and attender of Mars Hill. I could write more than I already have about that bolded segment but in this case mere allusion suffices.

 

... 

Wolfe: MFA programs are subject to the influences of what I call “the charming aristocracy.” That was a term coined by a French poet in the 1880s, Catulle Mendès. He said “All this business of naturalism”—Zola, Flaubert, Maupassant, and the rest—“is really finished. Today, no real writer wants to write for the masses. Today, one writes for a charming aristocracy.” Of course, that means an aristocracy of higher taste. To prove you have it, you have to praise things the masses wouldn’t understand or would consider too boring or weird for words: Joyce, Proust, Kafka, the early Faulkner, on up to Beckett, Pinter, Robbe-Grillet.

 

…

 

Wolfe: It becomes removed in a lot of ways. To the charming aristocracy, writing about the muck of everyday life is considered vulgar, which is another way of saying it’s too easy to understand and appeals to ordinary readers. Psychological sensitivities should be what it’s all about. Whereas, I think if you look back at the novelists who are remembered from ages past, practically every one of them wrote about his own time in a thoroughgoing way. Fielding, Dickens, Balzac, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Tolstoy… And they are so “accessible,” that being the charming aristocratic euphemism for readable. Anna Karenina is clear as a raindrop, but in no time you find yourself out in some very deep water. You feel the agony of an adulterous affair in the nineteenth century, even though today Anna and Vronsky would be nothing more than a Page Six item.

…

 

I was tempted to read a book called The Program Era about writing programs and I started into it but couldn't get far enough into it before having to return it to the city library. What Wolfe is getting at that I have noticed when I reflect back on my musical education and what some of my professors told me is that there's a kind of academic canon, stuff you're supposed to like to prove you're educated.  Then there's the "repertoire canon" as Richard Taruskin has put it, the music people voluntarily part with their own money to go hear.  Wolfe is laying out this class divide in literature but it's the kind of class divide he spent a lot of his career charting. 

 

And then, since it seems in some circles people want to talk about Jordan Peterson, it's almost quaint to consider that Tom Wolfe had some stuff to say about the distinction between work that conferred status verses work that confirmed dignity.

 

Wolfe: I think that started before feminism. I think that started in the era—I don’t know if you ever read The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Then, because of bureaucracy, a word that was in the air constantly, men were filling jobs that made them feel like replaceable parts in a machine, jobs they could hardly even explain to their children. They were feeling emasculated thanks to lack of authority. It was one thing to be the blacksmith who runs the shop, and maybe that’s not considered a job of high status, but it has authority, and you know you’re a man. What are you if you are working for Morgan Stanley? I don’t know. [emphasis added]

…

 

Wolfe's description seems plain enough--a lot of men had jobs in bureaucratic contexts where they didn't have a lot of authority and while Wolfe uses that word I think another, better, word for this might be dignity.  The town blacksmith didn't have a job with a high social status but anyone and everyone in the town knew what he was good at. It's a useful example of what Wolfe could say when he was "on".  Take that statement about how men felt like they were filling jobs that made them feel like cogs in a machine. That part is pretty rote, boilerplate.  But the part that comes at the end is about how the men who had these jobs could hardly explain what they did or a living to their own children.  When the subject is, "What do you do, dad?" the real hits-you-where-you-live anomie about the job you have is when your child asks you what you do and you're not sure how to explain what it is you do for which you get paid. 

Theres a line like that in Whit Stillman's film Metropolitan where the lizard von Slanaker confesses that the thing he most dreads is that someone will ask him "what do you do?"  He's just idle rich, that's it.  that's all.  He doesn't do anything.  That's a brief light Stillman's film sheds on this Amerian aristocrat who has money and no sense and a dubious moral compass.  So my comparison of Wolfe to Stillman was strategic.  It was part of a wind-up for something later, which has arrived.

So, seeing as I've read Tom Wolfe semi-regularly over the last twenty years it is kind of another reason why when I read some guys going on about how fantastic Jordan Peterson is and how he "gets it", what men of this age have to face I still say, so what?  It's not like Tom Wolfe didn't broach thee subject of how contemporary office and finance life can seem enervating and emasculating to guys who struggle to think of how to explain their day jobs to their own children. 

When Wolfe riffed decades ago about how you could buy all the Windsor and Newton paint you wanted in Akron, Ohio but that "every" artist "had" to go to New York to go get "the loft" he wasn't ripping on artists or art in themselves.  He was ripping on the status game with a certain bemused scorn mingled with sympathy.  After all, he made himself a notorious journalist it wasn't like he couldn't understand the appeal of having a reputation for being good at something.  But pertinent to his own comments about men and meaningful work, he made a point at being recognizably good at something.  What Sean Nelson alluded to in his encomium to Tom Wolfe was that writers like Tom Wolfe seemed to have vivid writerly personalities on the page but they did not make themselves more central to what they wrote than what and who they were writing about.  I like that about Wolfe and I like that about Didion.  It's been a guide to my own approach writing about stuff here, most obviously things to do with mars Hill. 

My journalism professor once said in a class lecture that one of the grave misunderstandings about editorial writing is to forget that it must always, finally, still be journalism--nobody cares what you think, people want to know what the facts are.  Writers like Wolfe had narrative voices that could be so vivid that inattentive readers could forget that Wolfe was writing about astronauts or art world status seeking and, along the way, had a vivid, memorable literary style.  The style at its best highlighted rather than distracted from substance.  What so many lesser imitators of Wolfe and Thompson and Didion and others imitated was the style. In that sense Wolfe can be blamed as well as praised for having such a dynamic and frenetic style it came to permeate whole fields of writing that, maybe, it shouldn't have influenced as much as it did.

an enconium for Tom Wolfe from someone at ... The Stranger

From Sean Nelson, of which we'll quote some large chunks.

 

https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2018/05/15/26179232/tom-wolfe-1931-2018

 

…

Of course, Wolfe and his NJ cohort also helped make journalism safe for run-on sentences, overcooked narrative conceits, and onomatopoeic indulgences, so... I hope Hunter S. Thompson and Lester Bangs saved him a comfy seat in the elite section of hell reserved for writers whose brilliant legacies are clouded by all the inferior imitators they inspired. [emphasis added]

 

…

His other great work was a novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, which performed a similar function for the culture of extreme greed in 1980s New York. Except instead of a eulogy, the book was more like one of the seven angelic trumpets announcing the coming rapture.

 

Bonfire nailed it: The saga of Sherman McCoy, self-proclaimed "master of the universe," his mistress Maria, the black kid they hit with their car, the particularly New York-style media frenzy that whips up around them, is an eerily timeless lens through which to view so many powderkeg issues of privilege, class, race, fame, inequity, ambition, avarice, bigotry, and indeed vanity that snake around the contemporary news and media landscape like silver dental floss through rotten teeth loosely wobbling in bleeding gums.

 

It's also a fantastically vivid and kinetic piece of writing—a little lightweight supermarket pop-fic perhaps, but nonetheless full of passages that never leave your memory. The prologue, "Mutt on Fire," set at an especially tense mayoral press conference, and it thrums like a wasps' nest:

 

It'll be on TV. The whole city will see it. They'll love it. Harlem rises up! What a show! Not the hustlers and the operators and the players rise up-but Harlem rises up! All of black New York rises up! He's only mayor for some of the people! He's the mayor of White New York! Set fire to the mutt! The Italians will watch this on TV, and they'll love it. And the Irish. Even the Wasps. They won't know what they're looking at. They'll sit in their co-ops on Park and Fifth and East Seventy-second Street and Sutton Place, and they'll shiver with the violence of it and enjoy the show. Cattle! Birdbrains! Rosebuds! Goyim! You don't even know, do you? Do you really think this is your city any longer? Open your eyes! The greatest city of the twentieth century! Do you think money will keep it yours?

 

Come down from your swell co-ops, you general partners and merger lawyers! It's the Third World down there! Puerto Ricans, West Indians, Haitians, Dominicans, Cubans, Colombians, Hondurans, Koreans, Chinese, Thais, Vietnamese, Ecuadorians, Panamanians, Filipinos, Albanians, Senegalese, and Afro-Americans! Go visit the frontiers, you gutless wonders! Morningside Heights, St. Nicholas Park, Washington Heights, Fort Tryon-por que pagar mas! The Bronx-the Bronx is finished for you! Riverdale is just a little freeport up there! Pelham Parkway-keep the corridor open to Westchester! Brooklyn—your Brooklyn is no more! Brooklyn Heights, Park Slope-little Hong Kongs, that's all! And Queens! Jackson Heights, Elmhurst, Hollis, Jamaica, Ozone Park-whose is it? Do you know? And where does that leave Ridgewood, Bayside, and Forest Hills? Have you ever thought about that! And Staten Island! Do you Saturday do-it-yourselfers really think you're snug in your little rug? You don't think the future knows how to cross a bridge?

 

And you, you Wasp charity-bailers sitting on your mounds of inherited money up in your co-ops with the twelve-foot ceilings and the two wings, one for you and one for the help, do you really think you're impregnable? And you German-Jewish financiers who have finally made it into the same buildings, the better to insulate yourselves from the shtetl hordes, do you really think you're insulated from the Third World?

 

 

 

That line, "You don't think the future knows how to cross a bridge?" has been on the tip of my mind's tongue for 30 years, still probably the best encapsulation of the inevitability of class uprising I've ever read.

 

…

 

Wolfe, as more than a few have noted, was just fine with Reagan.  Sometimes a writer has enough influence that even folks writing for The Stranger can grant that influence while disagreeing with political positions staked out by said authors.  When Joan Didion passes I'm not sure everyone is going to lead with how she, by her own account, voted ardently for Barry Goldwater or how she distrusted Reagan because he didn't seem like he was actually conservative about anything.

 

If there was something Wolfe could be memorably good at, it was roasting the elites of the New York scene for their insularity, privilege, and decadence ... all the while seeming to enjoy it a bit himself ... possibly like a late 20th century F. Scott Fitzgerald in a vague sort of way. 

 

Ethan Iverson remembering a paragraph from Tom Wolfe

 

https://ethaniverson.com/2018/05/15/a-paragraph-from-tom-wolfe/

As a teenager I thumbed through my mother’s copy of From Bauhaus to Our House without understanding much of it. However, one paragraph naturally stood out. Looking at it again I am struck by the perhaps needless cruelty of the author. Still, the larger point hits home then and now.

 

For that matter, in most of the higher arts in America prestige was now determined by European-style clerisies. By the mid-1960s, painting was a truly advanced case. The Abstract Expressionists had held on as the ruling compound for about ten years, but then new theories, new compounds, new codes began succeeding one another in a berserk rush. Pop Art, Op Art, Minimalism, Hard Edge, Color Field, Earth Art, Conceptual Art — the natural bias of the compounds toward arcane and baffling went beyond all known limits. The spectacle was crazy, but young artists tended to believe – correctly – that it was impossible to achieve major status without joining in the game. In the field of serious music, the case was even more advanced; in fact, it was very nearly terminal. Within the university compounds, composers had become so ultra-Schoenbergian, so exquisitely abstract, that no one from the outside world any longer had the slightest interest in, much less comprehension of, what was going on. In the cities, not even that Gideon’s army known as “the concert-going public” could be drawn to an all-contemporary program. They took place only in university concert halls. Here on the campus the program begins with Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag,” followed by one of Stockhausen’s early compositions, “Punkte,” then Babbitt’s Ensembles for Synthesizer, a little Easley Blackwood and Jean Barraqué for a change of pace, then the committed plunge into a random-note or, as they say, “stochastic” piece for piano, brass, Moog synthesizer, and computer by Iannis Xenakis. The program winds up with James P. Johnson’s “You’ve Gotta Be Modernistic.” Joplin and Johnson, of course, are as cozy and familiar as a lullaby, but they are essential to the program. The same thirty-five or forty souls, all of them faculty members and graduate students, make up the audience at every contemporary musical event. The unspeakable fear is that not even they will show up unless promised a piece of candy at the beginning and a piece of candy at the end. Joplin and Johnson are okay because both men were black and were not appreciated as serious composers in their own day.

 

What strikes me about the "needless cruelty" of Tom Wolfe's book is how that "needless cruelty" is the baseline of social and political commentary.  If the tone seems lacerating and condescending from Wolfe regarding highbrow art it's possible it seems that way because Wolfe was targeting art but, more directly, a class. 

 

By the way, the Easley Blackwood string quartets are okay but I like Bartok's a whole lot more.  But the zinger about how you have to promise candy at the start and candy at the end lest people not endure all the musical broccoli and brussel sprouts in the middle doesn't seem too harsh.  I say that as someone who actually likes some stuff by Xenakis and Blackwood. I don't care hugely for Stockhausen overall and Babbitt ... eh. 

 

But Wolfe, as so many have been saying, had a singular focus on status and its trappings.  His satires on art criticism and the arts scene are first and foremost about what might be called the leisure classes or the chattering classes.  It may smell like anti-intellectualism to those who like Xenakis and think Wolfe is ripping on Xenakis.  Eh, possible, but he's definitely making fun of what people of an educated and leisurely class began to feel they were obliged to provide patronage to by way of money and attention in the 1970s.  As one of my music teachers put it, the 1970s was a rough time when official composers and teachers thought you couldn't write tunes any longer.  Even Leo Brouwer was doing avant garde stuff, although he managed to sneak in some sweet prog rock style rhythms into his avant garde guitar music.  Then he started writing tunes again, but I digress.

 

If the quoted paragraph was actually Wolfe being needlessly cruel that's still restrained and vaguely polite enough to name all proper names.  Nothing in there that's half as vitriolic as some of the comments you can read at slippedisc these days.

 

a very brief (for me) comment on the Internet Monk piece about how futurist dispensationalism is no longer a fringe theology

http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/80663

this is less a comment on iMonk's post than on some claims made in the comments

What some people don't seem to understand is that there has never been a real conflict between dominionist strands of theology and dispensationalism.  Dispensationalism is subordinate in American theology.  The dominionist element comes first?  Why?  Go back and look at postmillennialism and the Social Gospel movements in the 19th century and early 20th century. There wasn't a conflict between Manifest Destiny and the Social Gospel, there wasn't a core conflict between the formal eschatological framework and the public policy back then.

It takes theological and historical ignorance to imagine that contemporary dominionist streams of thought and dispensationalism are somehow conceptually at odds with each.  Jeffrey Burton Russell had a book about religious dissent in the medieval period and in that short but useful survey he pointed out that during the medieval period the political dissidents found all sorts of millenarian views useful as a basis for political protests. The Catholic Church rejected millenarian views as bad theology for theological reasons but it was also, as Russell noted rather flatly and directly, rejected because those advocating postmillennial or premillennial views tended to do so in tandem with advocacy for political revolutions. 

So any Americans proposing that there's somehow a conceptual conflict between advocacy of any for of dominionism on the one hand and dispensationalism on the other just hasn't read enough history, most likely.

Now I happen to reject both dominionist thought and dispensationalist thought but I keep those categories distinct.  Unfortunately not very many Americans do seem interested in keeping those categories distinct.

On the whole, particularly since half my lineage is Native American, I've got a far more negative view of the long-term policy effects of postmillennialism paired with dominionism than with dispensationalism.  Sure, we have reason to be worried what premillenialist dispensationalists will do with a catalyzing role in a dominionist streak in political theology that has never gone away in America's civic religions. That's not the same thing as saying that dispensationalism is creepy because it's no longer fringe.  It's been the dominant view in American civic religious Christianity for at least half a century.  Get your view off the mainlines and it's been a norm, even if it shouldn't have been.

But given the history of the mainlines and given the history of the Social Gospel and Manifest Destiny let's be cautious to not act as if dominionist theology hasn't been normative in American Christianity and Christian engagement with politics for centuries.  The religious right isn't scary because of the dominionist streak, because the old mainline and even the religious left have the exact same doctrinal lens at a practical level.  It just seems different to journalists and some historians who are so busy looking at the platform of desired policies they are missing that the underlying eschatological theory is in common.  As I've dryly quipped here in the past, the underlying eschatological/apocalyptic framework for a postmillennialist theocratic Presbyterian and a Marxist isn't that different.  Since I reject postmillennial views across the board as disastrously interested in revolutions and social engineering in American cultural and political history I'm no more fond of one than the other.  But thanks to the peculiarities of American thinking one is view as different in practical terms than the other.  There ARE Differences, of course, but I think the core danger is shared.

Two postscript thoughts

1.  I have described myself as an amillenial partial preterist for decades when people have asked what my actual views are, and it's generally only come up in theological discussions where dispensationalists and postmillenialists tend to assume their view is the only real option and/or the other one is the alternative.  I don't think your views on the millennia do anything in themselves to preclude tendencies toward autocratic views.  That requires a distinct and too often separate set of thoughts and disciplines

2. Back when I was at Mars Hill I tended to come across people who were, if they thought about the issue of eschatology at all, defaulting to some form of dispensationalist futurism on the one hand or some kind of postmillennialism on the other.  Doug Wilson and others have an idiotic shorthand for things about optimillenialism and pessimillenialism.  Well, optimillenialists in the United States have penchants for Manifest Destiny and seeing that as a rationale for massacring Native Americans, which is half my lineage.  So I think people might understand why I find the legacy of postmillennialism and Manifest Destiny ghastly.  While dispensationalism could be scary informing public policy I don't think the full legacy of postmillennialism has been  seen for as bad as it has been.

There's a short anecdote that comes to mind.  Years and years ago I recall someone telling me at Mars Hill that he had to speak up in my defense and explain to a guy who would later be a pastor at Mars Hill that, no, I was not a heretic for being an amillenial partial preterist.  That someone explained that my views could be considered historically normal and mainstream in Christian terms and that this was not a sign that I was a heretic but that I had made a point of reading not-American theologians. 

Tom Wolfe, author of The Right Stuff, leading figure in the New Journalism scene, has died

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/15/obituaries/tom-wolfe-pyrotechnic-nonfiction-writer-and-novelist-dies-at-88.html

http://www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/2018/05/tom-wolfe-r-i-p.html

One of my friends who wrote for a college newspaper years ago remarked that it seemed like every 20-something guy who wrote for a college paper had a fantasy of being the next Hunter S. Thompson.  My rejoinder was, "Not me, I'd rather be the next Joan Didion." 

Among the leading figures of what has sometimes been called the New Journalism I never got into Thompson.  The two writers I did get into were Joan Didion and Tom Wolfe, in mostly equal measures.  I admired Didion's icy reserve and I admired Wolfe's effervescent and effusive writing style.  I have reread The Right Stuff more times than many other books I've read in my life. Some of those paragraphs describing crash sites brought tears to my eyes, they were so vividly written.  And having at one point wanted to be in the military and then concluded I'd never fit into such a culture, it was nonetheless fascinating reading Wolfe's account of the dread and Cold War context within which the early space race was inextricably woven.  We had to not just be number 1 but to show the whole world we were number 1. 

Wolfe's best writing managed to simultaneously skewer and demonstrate, even distill and embody American braggadocio.  I remember that his flamboyant description could abruptly stop for a dryly underplayed quip about how a fighter jet jock would rather punch a multi-million dollar hole in the ground than admit that he made a dumb-ass mistake.  Or how the early astronauts did not want that much, really, just to be led out on to a platform where tens of thousands of people could seem them and receive as much adulation as the Pope because that, really, was not too much to ask.  Wolfe managed to chronicle American people as capable of valor and mind-numbing egotism.  Especially in The Right Stuff Wolfe chronicled an America that was valorous and paranoid in equal measure, a story full of a people and a nation able to accomplish great things and simultaneously be obscenely and absurdly proud about it, insisting that basically the entire world know how awesome we are.

Even if I have a certain amount of affection for some avant garde stuff The Painted Word was very, very funny as a send-up of arts criticism.  It was a send-up of modernist art, too, but I think Wolfe was more right than the modern art world would admit he was when he declared that art theory ascended up its own fundamental aperture and came down to us as if from the heavens as literature.  The punchline seemed obvious enough, that modern art had become so theory laden that you found artists needing to write literary treatises to explain why a Frank Stella canvas was daring and revolutionary when an ordinary person would ask why a framed canvas that apparently had nothing more on it than white paint was even in a museum. 

From Bauhaus to Our House, of course, continued the critique of theory with an aim taken at architecture. 

Wolfe at his best formulated the satirical jabs that founder just about any and every time attempts at satire show up at a couple of websites I don't feel a need to mention by name. 

Still, I gave up on his novels swiftly.  What makes for bracing journalism does not necessarily make for bracing fiction.  Wolfe was a fantastic writer when his ebullient and detailed style described real flesh and blood people.  He was masterful at observing everything about the surface.  He was a bit less convincing in a more Dostoevskian mode in which the idea was to convey the thought lives and emotional arcs of imagined characters.  Not that I didn't read Bonfire of the Vanities.  I remember it being ... okay.

In a way Wolfe's prose reminds me of Whit Stillman, in the sense that Wolfe's subject could be construed as a bright and not altogether flattering light on the American aristocracy that imagined it was more respectable and ethical than it really was.  He wasn't exactly anti-American and as others have noted, Wolfe's prose doesn't exactly seethe with scarcely concealed contempt the way Mencken's does.  The likes of Wolfe and Stillman can be thought of as having played a role in chronicling a kind of WASP meltdown where a semi-formal American aristocratic class begins to lose its prestige and role and isn't quite sure what to do about that, and along the way is full of people who say and do kind of stupid things. 

But I can't say I think a whole lot about his novels,  Yeah, I read Bonfire and only dimly remember it.  His journalism is justifiably what the bulk of his reputation is built on. 

he was also a formative influence for me in my twenties.  I wanted to write way more like Wolfe and Didion than I wanted to write like Thompson and as has been noted in obituaries and commentaries thereon, Wolfe had an identifiable style but he did not make himself a character in the same way Thompson did.  If there's a common mistake among fans of New Journalism it is forgetting that in the end if you're a journalist people want to know what the news is. They want to find out what the facts about the world are.  There can be a type of narcissism and solipsism that can breed in New Jouralism that I feel is a net negative influence on features writing over the last thirty years.  I didn't detect this so much in Wolfe as I'd find it in post New Journalism exponents of the style.  I don't feel like naming names there because it'd be pointless.  There are too many people who write articles and reviews who find it almost impossible to separate themselves from the topic of review.  It's great to love or hate stuff and articulate that in a personal way ... but there's a kind of personal is the political to arts commentary and it seems to span the spectrum.

In the sense that Wolfe and other New Journalists introduced techniques that broke the "fourth wall" of journalistic distancing through the use of fictional narrative techniques that is something that we could consider bad as well as good.  Compared to a kind of faux-omniscient Establishment approach to journalism that got lured in byMcCarthy era paranoia maybe the New Journalism needed to happen to remind Americans that our journalists and chroniclers of American life and culture are also mortals with feet of clay and points of view.  Now that that whole approach from the New Journalism legacy has been assimilated thoroughly and is staring us down from every blog on the internet, including this one, now that I think about it, it has seemed that a direction to go is in a different direction from the one Wolfe took.  It's why I ultimately chose to emulate Didion rather than Wolfe. 

But I can't deny how formative and significant Wolfe's whole approach was.  His best work shows a journalist who could put you in the middle of an entire culture and its rules and aspirations, its ambitions and double standards, and see how people might navigate those.  He managed to demonstrate how inextricable heroism and egotism can be in the American psyche.  Sometimes he did that via demonstration and sometimes he did it by way of chronicle.

While I suppose it might be said that Wolfe was a stylist who was so brilliant as a stylist he didn't turn to ideas of substance there's something Manfred Bukofzer wrote about the Baroque era that comes to mind, that the early Baroque era was a revolution in style before there were any revolutions in forms.  In the arts a change of style does not always lead to a consolidation of new forms.  From Palestrina to Sweelinck some major changes happened.  Too many people think of Bach as the summation of the Baroque era.  There were many, many average, good and great composers from that century and a half of musical change.  By extension, if Wolfe's entire literary output an be thought of as "just" style that is not insignificant.  Sometimes styles have to change before new forms can be developed that make full use of those styles.  The last century and a half has been very tumultuous.  It's how it's tended to be.  I write all this as a Haydn fan--somebody had to consolidate what's known as the high Classic style before Mozart and Beethoven could be seen as raising it to "the next level".  Wolfe may never be the Mozart of journalism in American letters but he might be its haydn, a jovial joker with eloquence and wit who might, depending on who you asked, seem a bit too shallow for "real" thought.  That's as may be, but on the day of his passing I am taking some time to remember how much I have enjoyed his journalism over the years.