Sudetenland Tales by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

Sudetenland Tales

Page 298

Radical/Terrorist Chic

Tom Wolfe's 1970, but still verboten subject, is how culture's patrician classes; the wealthy, fashionable intimates of high society, have sought to luxuriate in both a vicarious glamour and a monopoly on virtue through their public espousal of street politics: a politics, moreover, of minorities so removed from their sphere of experience and so absurdly, diametrically, opposed to the islands of privilege on which the cultural aristocracy maintain their isolation, that the whole basis of their relationship is wildly out of kilter from the start. ... In short, Radical Chic is described as a form of highly developed decadence; and its greatest fear is to be seen not as prejudiced or unaware, but as middle class.

Terrorist chic, also known as "terror chic" or "militant chic," is a more recent and specific variation of the term. It refers to the appropriation of symbols, objects, and aesthetics related to radical militants, usually in the context of pop culture or fashion. When such imagery is deployed subversively, the process exemplifies aestheticization of propaganda.