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Yasmin, in Cairo, heard about the attacks of 9/11 and felt fleeting satisfaction at the idea of America receiving its comeuppance. Zuhra, in Islamabad, considered Bin Laden larger than life. Murat, in Istanbul, blamed America for the attacks. “How could a person in a cave in Afghanistan have planned such an attack as 9/11?” These views are evidence of “radical sheik”—a play on Tom Wolfe's phrase “radical chic,” expressions of sympathy for revolutionaries as anti-establishment heroes—without actually wanting these movements to succeed. This sort of symbolic endorsement does not translate into support for revolutionary goals or potential collaboration with terrorism.

This chapter explores literary responses to the late 1960s crisis in participatory professionalism, provoked by the period’s race riots and by conservatives’ successful appropriation of liberal poverty discourse. The chapter focuses on two texts that address the Community Action Program: Joyce Carol Oates’s them and Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. While these texts voice opposing political positions, both distrust white liberal efforts to speak for the ghetto, drawing on traditions of urban writing (naturalism and literary journalism) that resist the process imperative to break down barriers between author, audience, and lower-class subject matter. At the same time, both writers complicate their literary objectivity by incorporating aspects of the very participatory professionalism they seek to delimit.

This chapter tracks the rise of voluntary poor dress and its links to a middle-class rejection of inherited class positions often rooted in political protest—against widespread poverty, the Vietnam war, gender inequality, and environmental destruction. Like rock-n-roll’s appropriation of black musical styles, the adoption of visibly secondhand clothing, as well as Native American and Old West costumes, relied upon the white, middle-class conviction that sincerity, depth, passion, creativity, and even social equality were more accessible from the margins of society—past and present. As public appearances and personal identities became central to the social and political conflicts of the era, a dramatized appearance of elective poverty—often through secondhand consumption— joined other visible means of middle-class, usually white, social rebellion. One commonality attends almost all the wide array of secondhand dressers in the postwar years: in one direction or another, they expressed a disaffiliation with the middle class and its connotations of homogeneity, conformity, and bland plasticity. Beats, hippies, and Tom Wolfe’s derided “radical chic” all followed this pattern.