Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

But if either of the two extremists, Jerome Quat or Buster Roth, was intimidated, he hadn’t shown it yet.

Jerry Quat—a butterball clad in a tight sweater—V-necked with a white T-shirt showing in the V—was saying, “Yeah, but I don’t give a damn what the coordinate search showed, Fred! The fact remains, there is no way in the world that anabolic moron wrote that paper—and you know what, Fred? I’m not going to shut up about this until somebody”—pause, long enough to suggest that Somebody just might be the anabolic caveman sitting about three feet away from him, Buster Roth, uncharacteristically clad in a blazer and tie—“comes clean.”

Oh you little pisser, thought the President. Jerry Quat was ratcheting his impertinence up to the point where he would be forced to reprimand him or else lose face in front of Roth. Fortunately, he had already told Roth what to expect where Quat was concerned, which was free-floating resentment. But look at Roth. He’s clenching his teeth. At a certain point he’s going to explode over cracks like “anabolic moron.” That’s as much as accusing him of feeding his team steroids. Either of these hotheads was too much to have to deal with, and having both on his hands at the same time…how was he going to butter up Jerry Quat—whose life was one long, inflamed itch for revenge against the Buster Roths of this world—without detonating Buster Roth, who regarded the Jerry Quats of this campus as unsexed subversives out to sink “the program”?

Well, here goes: “Now, Jerry,” said the President, “I hope you realize that I don’t want you to shut up. I really mean that. One of your greatest contributions has been calling things by their right names, which makes it very hard to just finesse or bury the issues.” He smiled warmly. “Perhaps I shouldn’t say this—I may be asking for more than I’m bargaining for—but I want you to keep on calling a”—he started to say “a spade a spade,” but that was not acceptable any longer, even though it was an old, old expression and had nothing to do with “spade” as a piece of vulgar slang for African American—“calling things as you see them. You’re an outstanding history scholar, Jerry, but right now that’s one of the most important things you can do—keep everybody’s eyes open and thinking clearly, as only Jerry Quat can do it.”

The President was relieved to see that Quat’s grim frown failed him just long enough for a smile of childish pleasure to flicker at the corners of his mouth. Just a flicker, of course; he immediately returned to looking every inch a bitter and obnoxious little shithead. Look at him…in his late fifties…him and his Lenin goatee, his shapeless, baggy, unpressed khaki pants and a grim gray sweater so tight it hugged every fold and flop of flab of his upper body, making his chest look like breasts lying on a swollen gut. Nothing under it but a T-shirt, the absence of a collar fully exposing his frog’s swell of a double chin…into which has settled a round face whose fat smoothness is interrupted by the bags under his eyes, a pair of age-narrowed lips, and gulleys running from each side of his nostrils down past his lips, almost down to his jawline…and the goatee…all of which is topped by a thinning stand of black hair turning scouring-pad gray, cut short with no part, like an undergraduate’s. What is this look, this getup, supposed to represent? His aloofness from the Neckties and Dark Blue Suits (such as the President was wearing) who still run the world? His solidarity with rebelling youth (if any)? Or just a simple eternal adolescent bohemian poke in the eye? A combination of all that, probably.

Oh, the President knew the type very well by now, being Jewish himself. Only a fool would ever talk about it, of course, but there was more than one type of “Jewish intellectual.” The President, like Jerry Quat, probably, was three generations down the line from a penniless young immigrant from Poland named Moiscz Kutilizhenski. Immigration changed his last name to Cutler, and life on the streets of New York changed his first name to Mo. Mo became an electrician, started out on his own in New York as Cutler Commercial Wiring, and flourished in the building boom following World War I. Under his son, Frederick, a City College of New York graduate, the firm became Cutler Electric, which grew so big during the building boom of the 1950s and 60s that Frederick began to mix easily—on a business-social level—with the old Protestant establishment, and he became a member of the Ethical Culture church, one of two churches of choice for Jews who decided to completely assimilate, the Unitarian Church being the other. Frederick named one of his four sons Frederick junior, which was a true gesture of assimilation, since no traditional Jew ever named a child after a living person. By now the Cutlers were so well off that he enjoyed the luxury of packing Fred junior off to Harvard to study the higher things, as certified in due course by the boy’s B.A. from Harvard and Ph.D. in international relations from Princeton. After a brief teaching stint at Princeton, he became a career diplomat, serving for years as first secretary to the American embassy in Paris. Fred junior’s son, Frederick Cutler III, B.A., Harvard, Ph.D., Dupont, had a sterling academic career as a Middle East historian and at this moment, sitting at this vast desk, was the president of Dupont.

The man sitting across from him, the butterball grotesquely squeezed into a dark gray sweater, was of another sort entirely, despite the fact that they were both Jewish and agreed on practically every public issue of the day. Both believed passionately in protecting minorities, particularly African Americans, as well as Jews. Both regarded Israel as the most important nation on earth, although neither was tempted to live there. Both instinctively sided with the underdog; police violence really got them steamed. Both were firm believers in diversity and multiculturalism in colleges. Both believed in abortion, not so much because they thought anyone they knew might want an abortion as because legalizing it helped put an exhausted and dysfunctional Christendom and its weird, hidebound religious restraints in their place. For the same reason, both believed in gay rights, women’s rights, trans-gender rights, fox, bear, wolf, swordfish, halibut, ozone, wetland, and hardwood rights, gun control, contemporary art, and the Democratic Party. Both were against hunting and, for that matter, woods, fields, mountain trails, rock climbing, sailing, fishing, and the outdoors in general, except for golf courses and the beach.

The difference, as the President saw it, was that Quat was a resentful petit bourgeois Jewish intellectual, as the Marxists used to say. Not that Frederick Cutler III had ever enunciated this insight to a living soul, other than his wife. He hadn’t lost his mind, after all. In the Cutler theory, the Jerome Quats of the academic world were born to parents in the middling strata of American society who told them from as far back as they could remember that life was a Manichaean battle—i.e., the forces of Light versus the forces of Dark, of “us” against the goyim, with white Christians, especially the Catholics and White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, being the most powerful and most treacherous. Every incoming Jerry Quat on the Dupont faculty immediately established the fact that despite the last name, Buster Roth was not Jewish. He was of German stock, stone German and stone Catholic. In Fred Cutler’s taboo theory, the parents of the Jerome Quat types had never reached the business and social elevation where non-Jews at that altitude very much wanted you in their orbit, and your self-interest and theirs became interdependent. In the eyes of Jerome Quat, whose father had been a mid-level civil servant in Cleveland or some such place, there could never be a true accommodation. The WASPs and Catholics could make all the protestations they wanted, but they would forever remain insensitive, powerful, treacherous, and by now genetically anti-Semitic. Or to put it another way, the Quats were the usual little people with limited vision. The Cutlers were men of the world.