Stanley Crouch has made
his reputation as a sort of literary bruiser, both
literally and figuratively. He's known for his
savage, slashing assaults on celebrities both
highbrow and low -- particularly those fellow
African-Americans who, in Crouch's view, take
too seriously the pieties of political correctness
and multiculturalism. And, like many New York
intellectuals of old, Crouch doesn't always make
a clear distinction between writin' and fightin'. In
the jazz world -- where Crouch's often
controversial opinions carry a great deal of weight
-- more than a few of his remarks have led to
fisticuffs.
It's not hard to understand why. Crouch is, if
nothing else, blunt in his insults. In the past, he's
dismissed critic bell hooks as a "terrier" and
compared novelist Toni Morrison to P.T.
Barnum. In his latest collection of essays,
Always in Pursuit, Crouch -- a contributing
editor at the New Republic and a columnist for
the New York Daily News -- takes on everyone
and everything from the bland pop of Michael
Jackson ("The King of Narcissism") to the raw
comedy of Richard Pryor and Def Comedy Jam
("minstrelsy with dirty words, Uncle Tom cursing
his way to the bank"); from Phil Donahue
("irritating ... smug ... sanctimonious") to
Malcolm X (a "saber-rattling black nationalist ...
rabble rouser").
Crouch's critics on the left have tended to dismiss
him as little more than a neocon Uncle Tom,
winning plaudits from the establishment for
espousing the sort of "political incorrectness" that
plays all too well in Peoria. They have a point:
Does anyone imagine that it takes much in the
way of guts to denounce rap music as "garbage"
or to conclude that nuttily Afrocentric City
College of New York professor Leonard Jeffries
is a "buffoon"? Or that it takes real courage for
Crouch to denounce "liberal racism" at a
conference sponsored by the American Enterprise
Institute? (One of his essays was originally
delivered as a talk there.)
Still, Crouch is something more than a neocon hit
man. While he generally prefers to attack with a
right hook, landing his hardest blows on
unsuspecting liberal icons and purveyors of pop
culture "garbage," his ideological affinities are
unpredictable, to say the least. Always in
Pursuit contains loving paeans to the late Ron
Brown, former Clinton administration
wheeler-dealer, and (even more strangely) to
defense attorney Johnnie Cochran, whom one
might have expected Crouch to dismiss as a
race-baiting conspiracy-monger.
Crouch's greatest crimes, though, come in the
realm of style. Though he has a certain flair with
the sound bite, most of Crouch's sentences are
baggy, formless concoctions that only loosely
adhere to conventional rules of grammar; his
book is a chore to traverse. Take this sentence, a
commentary on last year's summer blockbuster
Twister, which Crouch seems to think contains
some profound lessons on life in postmodern
America: "This American Mars and Diana who,
far more than a century ago, became the pioneer
man and woman on our frontier and have now
been remade yet again to speak for the rallying
point of the sexes in the face of our shifting
redefinitions of each other and of the frontier that
is now at least partially about how we shall use
our technology to better human life."
No, it doesn't take much courage to toss another
log on the fire of political correctness. But it does
take a certain amount of chutzpah to push a
sentence like that into print. -- Salon