V. S. Naipal

As is often the case, the most interesting discussion is over at Steve Sailer’s.

I’ve not read much of his work, but even a small dose was enough to convince me that Naipaul, like Tom Wolfe, was that most fearsome of men the intelligent outsider who notices things. And, again like Wolfe, he was not afraid to point out absurdities and pretensions when they came to his attention.

Wolfe had Leonard Bernstein, the Black Panthers, and Radical Chic. Naipaul had Michael X aka Michael Abdul Malik aka Michael de Frietas: Hustler, criminal, pimp, revolutionary, cult leader, murderer.

Michael X knew a good hustle when he found one and he pounced like the good predator he was:

At every stage of his career he was supported by some kind of jargon and could refer his actions to some kind of revolutionary ideal.

Naipaul is actually more interested in his enablers and Michael X had many. The Observer praised him as an “authentic voice of black bitterness”. John Lennon visited his commune in Trinadad and would go on to pay for his defense attorney, William Kunstler. The “Save Michael X” movement drew in the usual suspects like Angela Davis, Dick Gregory, and Kate Millet.

Naipaul is unsparing in his assessment of these frivolous people playacting with degenerate ideas :

That section of the middle class that knows only that it is secure, has no views, only reflexes and scattered irritations, and sometimes indulges in play: the people who keep up with 'revolution' as with the theater.
...
Those who continue to simplify the world and reduce other men … to a cause, the people who substitute doctrine for knowledge and irritation for concern, the revolutionaries who visit centers of revolution with return air tickets, the hippies, the people who wish themselves on societies more fragile than their own, all those people who in the end do no more than celebrate their own security.