Not Feeling Very Nostalgic for Whatever Happened at Dracula’s Castle

Spare us the ‘tragical chic’, and release the Epstein files

Door lockers by Emiel Maters on Unsplash

A seminal essay in the trope of jeering at white liberals — according to the new book Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals), by Kevin M. Schultz, about which I wrote a few weeks ago — was Tom Wolfe’s illumination of “that party at Lenny’s.”

Don’t we all remember that party?

New York Magazine

The essay was published in 1970. Today, radical chic has its own Wikipedia article, which defines it as “the fashionable practice of upper-class people associating with politically radical people and causes.”

You can read the essay for free (PDF), though be warned it’s 25,000 words and was intended to amuse a certain audience 55 years ago.

I thought of “Radical Chic,” of its style and tone, when I read Sunday’s essay about the good old Jeffrey Epstein days in New York in the early 2000s.

New York Times

“The emails are like a portal back to a lost Manhattan power scene,” writes Shawn McCreesh in the New York Times. He’s referring to the emails released a week ago from the Epstein estate.

(Peruse those 20,000 documents if you have time or wish to send yourself back in time.)

This crowd who just so happened to be reflected in Epstein’s contacts “once meant everything to status-obsessed New Yorkers,” McCreesh writes. “It was the world that Donald Trump came out of, and the one that Mr. Epstein had so effectively beguiled after having grown up in a middle-class household in Coney Island.”

Epstein glided through “the twilight of an old guard made up of Wall Street billionaires, media-industry heavyweights, politicians and old-money socialites,” the pals he invited to his seven-story Manhattan mansion that made Woody Allen think of Dracula’s castle.

Ah, for “the clubby nature of the old media,” in “the atmosphere of a New York that no longer exists”! They were “going to dinner at Rao’s, the uptown Italian restaurant where it was famously hard to get a table” and all that. In 2003, Epstein really thought that he, New York Daily News owner Mortimer B. Zuckerman, and the writer Michael Wolff were going to buy New York Magazine. Why not?

Epstein’s guys “seem to squirm as they notice society changing around them.” But even when some people got mean, others stayed nice. When in 2011 Tina Brown (then at Newsweek and The Daily Beast) asked Alexandra Wolfe to write about Epstein, press agent R. Couri Hay gave Epstein a friendly warning that it was coming.

(Alexandra Wolfe is the daughter of the guy who had written “Radical Chic” four decades earlier, for whatever that may mean.)

When you read the emails, McCreesh says, you sense how “that protected realm vanished into the mists of time, pulled under by the rising forces of the internet and the #MeToo movement.”

Of course, Epstein was charged with sex trafficking and died in his prison cell, but before then — ah, those were the days.

Weren’t they?

Hmm. Well, some men feel nostalgic for it, anyway. A fallible clique doing tragical chic.

Epstein was pals with a lot of people, perhaps most of all with Donald Trump.

Attorney Gloria Allred estimates that Epstein victimized a thousand girls.

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Who knows how many victims may never come forward, may never be identified, may have been lost — from how many countries. Epstein owned a private island in the Caribbean.

That’s why the House and Senate voted nearly unanimously for the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which means that the Department of Justice should release the remaining Epstein files publicly in a searchable database.

Trump said he would sign it. The congressional support, by the numbers, is veto-proof anyway.

He could have unilaterally ordered the release of the files at any time, and then it wouldn’t have had to go to a congressional vote to begin with.

HuffPost

He could sign the legislation to release the files. He could do this at any moment.

Really, any moment now.

My point was, though, that we don’t have to feel nostalgic for a certain old order among the New York elite who abused girls because it was their clique’s type of chic. Even if we want to read and write about those people, how many essays can be gotten out of it? Having receded so far into the past, and with incomplete transparency, it begins to gain the feel of a half-fiction.

Insofar as that Age of Men ended — or has been partly exposed — it’s for a reason.

A lot has to be done to repair these wrongs. It is because of some men’s resistance to doing so that the current request, six years after Epstein’s death, is simply for the information.