Series

Ally McBeal (9 p.m., Fox) starts its new season with a bang — literally. On the way to work one morning, Ally succumbs to temptation and has sex in a car wash with a handsome stranger (guest Jason Gedrick). Everybody Loves Raymond (9 p.m., CBS) introduces us to Debra’s sister Jennifer (guest Ashley Crow), a “bohemian” who has undergone a surprising lifestyle change. On Family Law (10 p.m., CBS), an aging actor (guest Alan King) sues for libel when a newspaper column erroneously reports his death, and a woman fights for custody of her granddaughter after the girl’s parents’ death.

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Specials

In the six-part series Wonders of the African World (check local times, PBS), author Henry Louis Gates, head of Harvard’s black studies department, tours the sites of great ancient African cities and civilizations and challenges the Western view of Africa as a “dark continent” civilized by white Europeans. The BBC-A&E miniseries Vanity Fair (8 p.m. EDT/9 PDT, A&E) concludes.

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Sports

Football:

Falcons at Steelers (9 p.m., ABC)

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Talk

Rosie O’Donnell (syndicated) Jennifer Love Hewitt, Gloria Estefan

David Letterman (CBS) Jimmie Walker, Buena Vista Social Club

Jay Leno (NBC) Gov. Jesse Ventura, Ricky Martin (rerun)

Conan O’Brien (NBC) Mayor Rudolph Giuliani (rerun)

Only 46 years old, West has been called — if only by his publisher — “the pre-eminent African American intellectual of his generation.” His work has elicited White House invitations and more requests as a speaker, blurb writer and distinguished guest than any individual could possibly fill. In a market in which it is increasingly difficult for genuine scholars to get an academic monograph in print, West has written or edited 20 books published by commercial publishers — 16 in the last 10 years alone.

Even more remarkable, except for a thin volume of rambling opinions on issues of the day called “Race Matters,” none of West’s books sell sufficiently to justify the commercial support his work has received. They are put into print (as one of his publishers informed me) as “prestige” publications to bring credit to the house.

One reason for the failure of West’s books to gain intellectual traction is that while his writings combine the philosophically grandiose with postmodern frou frou, they are singularly lacking in the intellectual power that would sustain either. His first effort, published when he was 29 (and old enough to know better) was titled “Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity.” Then followed “Prophetic Fragments,” “The American Evasion of Philosophy,” “The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought,” “Prophetic Thought in Postmodern Times,” “Prophetic Reflections,” “Keeping Faith” and “Restoring Hope.”

If the subject matter implied by these titles suggests intellectual airiness, their style recalls a Jesse Jackson riff without the rhymes. Thus we learn from notes West has supplied for the new Cornel West Reader that “prophesy” (which appears to be his academic specialty) means injecting Marxist clichis into religious dogmas: “These introductory remarks to my second book, ‘Prophetic Fragments’ (1988), convey my moral outrage at the relative indifference of American religion to the challenge of social justice beyond charity.” The excerpt from the book that appears in the Reader is more explicit (the style pompously typical): “The principal aim of ‘Prophetic Fragments’ is to examine and explore, delineate and demystify, counter and contest the widespread accommodation of American religion to the political and cultural status quo.”

A few years ago, Leon Wieseltier wrote a cover feature for the New Republic on West’s oeuvre called “The Decline of the Black Intellectual.” West’s productions were, in Wieseltier’s mortifying words “monuments to the devastation of a mind by the squalls of theory.” Surveying the corpus of West’s academic work, Wieseltier concluded that the Alphonse Fletcher Jr. Harvard professor was an intellectual empty suit whose writing was “noisy, tedious, slippery … sectarian, humorless, pedantic and self-endeared,” and whose works were “almost completely worthless.” As Gertrude Stein once said of the city of Oakland, there is no “there” there.

Ironically, it is the very emptiness, even incoherence, of his intellectual persona that West has managed to turn into a career virtue. One of the early catalysts of his rise into the cultural stratosphere was his plea for racial harmony. As a Marxist black radical he was almost unique in saying that it was not appropriate for other black militants to hate all whites and Jews. Yet he has endorsed the radicals grouped around the magazine Race Traitor, which calls for the “abolition of whiteness,” and two of America’s most notorious black race haters.

While West is known as the most prominent radical among African-Americans preaching ecumenical healing between blacks and Jews, he is a friend to Louis Farrakhan, the most influential anti-Semite in America. Recently, as Bill Bradley’s advisor on blacks, he encouraged the presidential candidate to meet with Al Sharpton (whose own senatorial candidacy West supported). This is the same Sharpton who incited black anti-Semites to boycott a Jewish-owned store in Harlem, which was then torched by a deranged member of the group and set on fire, killing seven people.

West can maintain this oxymoronic position — racial healer and bedfellow of racial extremists — for the simple reason that no one takes him seriously. He is the quintessential non-threatening radical, an African American who can wave the bloody shirt to orchestrate the heartstrings of white guilt, while coming to dinner at the Harvard faculty club and acting as a gentleman host.

The text of the “Cornel West Reader,” itself a holograph of his iconic place in the PC culture, reads like the diary of an inginue — breathless with discoveries both real and imagined, particularly the discovery of self. It is as though Georgie Porgie, reincarnated as a Harvard don, stuck in his thumb and pulled out this plum: “I am a Chekhovian Christian.” Thus West announces his intellectual identity in the introduction.

He proceeds to go on and on about his “Chekhovian Christian viewpoint,” whatever that means. But looking for tangible meaning in West’s prose is a terminally discouraging quest, a bit like looking for a breath of fresh air at the bottom of the sea. There is no “there” there, except perhaps the tedious injection of more religious sentiments into Marxist cant:

I am a Chekhovian Christian … By this I mean that I am obsessed with confronting the pervasive evil of unjustified suffering and unnecessary social misery.

If we ask why Chekhov (and not, say, Tony Kushner or Spike Lee), however, all we get is a blast of hot air: “I find the incomparable works of Anton Chekhov - the best singular body by a modern artist …” Or, as specifically as West can manage: “[Chekhov's] magisterial depiction of the cold Cosmos, indifferent Nature, crushing Fate and the cruel histories that circumscribe desperate, bored, confused and anxiety-ridden yet love-hungry people, who try to endure against all odds, rings true to me.”

Well, duh. What has this to do with identifying Chekhovianism as a genus of Christianity? It is beyond West’s mental reach to address the question his juxtaposition begs: How can a Christian universe informed by love and the prospect of redemption be squared with the cold Chekhovian Cosmos, an “indifferent Nature [and] crushing Fate?” Don’t spend too many gray cells attempting to answer that one.

Throughout, the intellectual superficiality is accompanied by an intellectual status-seeking worthy of a character out of Molihre: “Despite my Chekhovian Christian conception of what it means to be human - a view that invokes pre-modern biblical narratives …” “I stand in the skeptical Christian tradition of Montaigne, Pascal and Kierkegaard …” “My Chekhovian Christian viewpoint is idiosyncratic and iconoclastic. My sense of the absurdity and incongruity of the world is closer to the Gnosticism of Valentinus, Luria or Monoimos … My intellectual lineage goes more through Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, Rilke, Melville, Lorca, Kafka, Celan, Beckett, Soyinka, O’Neill, Kazantzakis, Morrison and above all, Chekhov … And, I should add, it reaches its highest expression in Brahms’s ‘Requiem’ and Coltrane’s ‘A Love Supreme.’”

Notwithstanding the intellectual jive, comedy would be an inapt term to describe a yearning like West’s, which has been socially constructed and is entirely unnecessary. For his intellectual charade reflects the political sickness of the modern academy, which has thrown over its traditional calling to the “disinterested pursuit of knowledge,” and assumed a new institutional identity as an “agency of social change.” West’s plight is that of a paradigmatic affirmative-action baby, whom the good wishes of his “oppressors” have elevated so far beyond his merits that he has lost sight of terra firma below. As a result, he has been condemned to a life of suspended animation, his entire being addressed to the impossible task of proving that he is someone he can never be.

Although West is almost incapable of writing a concrete sentence, he shows just enough autobiographical skirt in “The Cornel West Reader” to betray the source of this dilemma. Growing up as a precocious black child in the radical 1960s, West became a black militant activist, president of his senior high school class and an inevitable target of liberal uplift. At 17, he was recruited to Harvard where his political militancy convinced him that he had more to tell his professors than they had to teach him. He was determined, as he informs us, to press the university and its intellectual traditions into the service of his political agendas and not the other way around: to have its educational agendas imposed on him. “Owing to my family, church, and the black social movements of the 1960s, I arrived at Harvard unashamed of my African, Christian, and militant de-colonized outlooks. More pointedly, I acknowledged and accented the empowerment of my black styles, mannerisms and viewpoints, my Christian values of service, love, humility and struggle, and my anti-colonial sense of self-determination for oppressed people and nations around the world.”

This was a crucial moment for what could have been a promising student — the confrontation of a brash but also impressionable youth with a 300-year-old educational institution dedicated to passing on the intellectual traditions of a 3,000-year-old civilization. It was a system that had shaped generations before him. Yet, it was a system that failed West, as its liberal ramparts collapsed before his militancy, backed by the cultural radicalism of the age.

In the years West was a student at Harvard, traditional disciplines were being broken down and destroyed, intellectual authority assaulted and deconstructed, and the university transformed into a quasi-political party. New disciplines and even entire institutions were created — ideologically committed black studies and women’s studies departments, paganized theology schools, Marxist and post-Marxist curricula in the fields of English and the humanities.

The old and tested rules of scholarship were rejected. Instead of educating and disciplining their intellectual tyro, Harvard and its liberal faculties merely encouraged him. It was the PC thing to do for the oppressed. Cornel West’s aborted education was a case of what Shelby Steele has analyzed as liberal whites looking for moral absolution and radical blacks looking for the easy way up — and who could blame them or West for that? As a result, the once-promising student never learned the difference between an intellectual argument and a political attitude, between the pursuit of an intellectual inquiry and the search for “answers” that were ideologically correct.

“The Cornel West Reader” is a testament to the intellectual vacuum that a progressive education creates. The trappings of intellect are in place, the canonical names invoked, the capsule histories recalled, the theories broadly rehearsed. But behind the footnotes and the latinate prose, the vulgar mind of the activist is feverishly at work. A “discourse” is produced in which political postures invariably substitute for thought.

The intellectual ruin of West is not an isolated case. There is a whole generation of racially favored intellectual water flies — Bell Hooks, Michael Dyson, Robin D.G. Kelley, Patricia Williams, to name a few — whose cultural elevation is not only unrelated to any serious intellectual achievement, but has eliminated the possibility of one.

For them, as for West, the pathos lies in what might have been. The left-wing university culture has stripped them of an educational opportunity that is given only once per individual lifetime. Meanwhile, the self-appointed social redeemers, whom West thanks for helping him along, are in reality the very people who deprived him of a chance to learn the hard, old-fashioned way, and thus helped to destroy whatever intellectual potential he may once have had.

What is going on is a fear of these kids and, in most of the cases, a refusal to deal with their
real problems with more expensive talk theories. We give them some dope and stick them away.

It’s strange and quite scary: Kids who do the kinds of things I did when I was in
school (in the ’50s and ’60s) are considered “disturbed” and in need of
some very serious mind-altering medication; but if they drink beer or smoke
dope, they are criminals.

– Ronald C. Couch

Waters does readers a disservice by
continually intermingling the use of stimulant medications such as Ritalin
with antidepressants. Ritalin has been studied for more than 30 years, and has never shown any
significant long-term problems. A recent study found it was most likely
underprescribed rather than overprescribed. Attention deficit hyperactive
disorder, while sometimes found with depression, is a completely different
disorder and it makes little sense to try to focus on both at once.

– Patricia Saperstein

The only thing the recent school shooters have in common — aside from being male and
young — was the fact that they were all prescribed medication:

• Shawn Cooper, Ritalin, blasted shotgun inside school.

• Eric Harris, Luvox, Columbine H.S.
• T.J. Solomon, Ritalin, shot six of his schoolmates.
• Kip Kinkel, Ritalin and Prozac, blasted parents and killed two at his
  school — and wounded 22.

Maybe psychiatrist Harold Koplewicz, director of New York
University’s Child Study Center (obviously an advocate for medicating
children) should get into counseling himself.

– Jeffrey Abelson

New York

I am 19, and I have been taking some sort of mood medication, on and off,
since I was 8. I believe that taking Ritalin at an early age has
partially caused my ongoing sleep disorders. Diagnosed with ADD (as it was
then called), I “grew out of it” at about 10 and stopped taking Ritalin. At 13, when I was besieged with depression, a psychiatrist put me on Prozac after
talking to me for 10 minutes. But without a mood stabilizer, I became
manic. In one horrifying instance, I was put on Halidol to control
delusions, and I shook so hard I frightened my schoolmates.

Managed care is the scourge of modern medicine. Neurology, especially children’s neurology, is little understood, as
are the ramifications of mind-altering drugs, but self-absorbed yuppie
parents would rather dope up their kids than address their family problems.

– Lillie Wade

The making of Henry Louis Gates, CEO
BY CRAIG OFFMAN

(06/16/99)

Having worked both as an academic and a manager at the Encyclopaedia
Britannica, I find that Craig Offman’s piece rings very true. Unfortunately, the situation he describes is
characteristic of the way multimedia encyclopedias are produced.
Encyclopedias have always been deeply commercial ventures disguised in
academic garb, and print encyclopedias were often as rushed and
badly managed as Encarta Africana. The digitization of encyclopedias has only
increased that trend; and in a period also characterized by a greater
reliance on outsourcing and temporary labor and greater attention to marketing,
the results have been predictably bad both for people who work on these
projects, and for the products. Usually the devotion of serious writers and
editors, who don’t want their names to be associated with shoddy work and are
willing to put in the overtime necessary to do the job right, is the only
thing that keeps this work on track. Good products can come out of these
efforts, but despite the system, not because of it.

It also comes as no surprise that this style of content production should
find its way into the university. Academia has long benefited from skilled,
underpaid labor in the form of graduate students; more recently, it has
subsidized faculty superstars with underpaid adjuncts. (It’s no coincidence
that the superstar system was built in the same decade that saw the explosion
of adjunct teaching.) Now corporate alliances with universities are giving
profit-making ventures access to that pool of talent, but what those on the
shop floor will gain from this brave new world is unclear. In simpler times,
their low pay was made up for (at least in principle) by career-advancing
training in new research techniques, mentorship or co-authorship on scholarly
papers. Whether they’ll be able to benefit from future efforts to commoditize
their intellectual labor — when universities and “dot coms” begin turning
leveraging Web sites into money-making ventures in distance learning, for
example — remains to be seen.

– Alex Pang

Project Manager, SiliconBase

Stanford University

Stanford, Calif.

Offman writes, “In today’s university, academics in the science and technology
departments can easily turn a profit from their intellectual work. With
the help of a technology licensing office on campus, an academic can
become an entrepreneur, often collaborating with a company to distribute
his or her invention/discovery in the form of a marketable product.”

Offman doesn’t cite any examples or other support for the facile argument he makes here — probably because he is entirely wrong. Employees of a university sign a contract with the university, giving the rights to all inventions and other intellectual property to the university. So academics, especially in the humanities, aren’t making any money. Why would they have to rely on corporations for support if they did?

Offman implicitly condemns academics for being remote with his
repeated use of the term “ivory tower,” yet he also condemns Gates’
very public dissemination of knowledge. I wonder if Offman has ever
read any of Gates’ work, which is highly accessible and interesting,
not at all the stuff of the “ivory tower.”

If this Web page is supposed to encourage people to think, why does it use
such superficial, ranting rhetoric? Why not offer facts and analytic tools
rather than cheap and obvious rhetorical strategies?

– Amy Vondrak

Syracuse, N.Y.

Nothing Personal: No pierced nostril for Barbie
BY AMY REITER
(06/16/99)

Exactly how is Sen. Inhofe responsible for the private, unauthorized
behavior of some of his staffers? How does their behavior make him a
hypocrite? If he hires a homosexual, does that make him a hypocrite also?
According to that view, he must avoid hiring homosexuals in order to be moral.

Actually, we all know why this is being publicized. This story is being
used as a club in order to beat Inhofe by those who disagree with him politically — nothing more.

– Paul Osborn

Nothing Personal: The nearly nekkid netrepreneur
BY AMY REITER
(06/17/99)

Regarding the “Look out! He’s got a fish!” item: One thing which I think we can all agree is really funny is a man assaulting his partner. It’s pretty funny when he just uses his fists, but when, in his rage, he gets all inventive — well, that’s for sure going the extra
mile. The thing that made this so incredibly hilarious was the way it was
accompanied by stories about the deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson and Nancy
Richards-Akers at the hands of abusive partners. Genius!

Today’s Salon was a class act all the way.

– Melissa Curley

Drunk like me
BY STEVE BURGESS

(06/16/99)

In Burgess’ last paragraph, he goes badly astray. Jack Trimpey’s “venom” toward AA is by no means misplaced. Thanks to Alcoholics Anonymous, countless people have been led
down a destructive path whereby their chances for recovery are chained to an
arbitrary process that forces them to think about booze constantly.

For example: On the rare occasion I feel tempted to drink, I merely swat the idea
away like an annoying fly. A member of AA, on the other hand, must go
through an unnecessarily drawn-out process of running the steps through
their mind, gnashing their teeth as they wait to get to a private phone, get
to such a phone and call their sponsor, endure their sponsor’s so-called
wisdom and, finally, run off to a meeting. My method takes about 24 seconds;
AA’s consumes nearly 24 hours. While I’m
sure that Burgess’ experience was more pleasant, mine was more typical:
I faced sanctimonious, smug peer pressure and self-righteous demands that I get
a sponsor and “work the steps”. Thank God for Jack Trimpey (yes, I’m a
Christian, and I still dislike AA) and his egalitarian ideas for rational
recovery.

– Rob Anderson

The great Silicon Valley soap opera
BY JANELLE BROWN
(06/17/99)

Apple did not, in fact, steal the ideas for the Mac from Xerox PARC: They purchased the rights to use them, and they have never denied that PARC is where tools like bit-mapped displays,
mice and GUIs were invented.

– Steve Hull

Buried in the back of the thick issue was a writer who seemed somewhat incongruous among these swells. But critic Stanley Crouch’s exploration of Duke Ellington’s lasting contribution to American culture was easily the most trenchant and well-written piece in the issue. Ellington “understood the blues as both music and mood,” Crouch wrote. “He knew that those who thought of the blues as merely a vehicle for primitive complaint had their drawers or their brassieres on backward. The blues knows its way around. It can stretch from the backwoods to the space shuttle, from the bloody floor of a dive to the neurotic confusion of a beautifully clothed woman in a Manhattan penthouse. The blues — happy, sad, or neither — plays no favorites.”

As the “Black in America” edition hit the stands, the burly writer departed his Greenwich Village digs for Harvard and the gala surrounding the launch of the special issue. Before C-Span cameras in a packed auditorium at the Kennedy School of Government, Crouch joined black theologian and philosopher Cornel West, writer Jill Nelson, New York Times editorial writer Brent Staples and NBC News correspondent Gwen Ifill in a discussion of the roles of blacks in mainstream media. More than your typical round of academic navel-gazing, the panel managed to achieve new heights of public theater — and added to Crouch’s bomb-throwing legend.

“You see,” Crouch offered, winding up for a trademark riff on race, demagoguery and the sorry state of the American press, “when you look at a nutcase like Louis Farrakhan …” At this, the usually serene West blew his Afro: “Why do you have to call the minister out of his name? Don’t you know you diminish his humanity when you use words like that!” The sniping exchange that followed was a brief flash of red-hot tension in an otherwise polished discussion. Everyone in the room, from publishing executives, heavy-duty eggheads and bigfoot journalists to self-consciously grungy students, seemed surprised at the flare-up. Everyone except Stanley Crouch, of course.

Some two years later, that episode is a classic entry in the pantheon of Crouchian lore, another small but full-color glimpse at the style and thinking of a successful middle-aged black man who follows few comfortable paths. Armed with an elephant’s memory and a passionate knowledge of and engagement with art (blues and jazz especially, though not exclusively) and history (American, though not exclusively), Crouch delights in slaying the dragons of convention — particularly those that guard the sometimes-insular world of black intellectuals. Crouch’s troublemaking reputation was made with his first essay collection, 1990′s “Notes of a Hanging Judge,” which smacked the slumbering genre of race and cultural criticism out of its 30-year torpor. In that book he dared to eviscerate several African-American icons, notably Nobel Laureate novelist Toni Morrison, whom he fingered as a literary snake-oil saleswoman who “perpetually interrupts her narrative with maudlin ideological commercials.” “Beloved,” Crouch wrote, “reads largely like a melodrama lashed to the structural conceits of the miniseries. Were ‘Beloved’ adapted for television (which would suit the crass obviousness that wins out over Morrison’s literary gift at every significant turn) the trailer might go like this: ‘Meet Sethe, an ex-slave woman who harbors a deep and terrible secret that has brought terror into her home.’” And so on. This was, we now know, particularly prescient criticism, considering the bombastic outcome of Oprah Winfrey’s recent big-screen version of Morrison’s 1987 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.

Crouch also took down filmmaker Spike Lee (“a nappy-headed Napoleon”), while championing young white artists like Quentin Tarantino, whose use of the term “nigger” Crouch defended in his next essay collection, “The All-American Skin Game.” In a piece lauding another nontraditional black writer, Albert Murray, Crouch praised him for not being “taken in by … the simplistic versions of heritage [or] protest that led to the political Zip Coon shows of LeRoi Jones, Eldridge Cleaver, and the like.”

Crouch’s in-your-face attack on the shibboleths of black pride, Afrocentrism (whose proponents he has called “lost”) and gangsta rap music, has led his black critics to call him a conservative sellout, a race traitor and a loudmouthed cultural opportunist. Protofeminist mojo woman bell hooks daintily told New Yorker writer Robert Boynton in 1995: “He has seen that it pays off when you kiss the ass of white supremacy.” Playwright Amiri Baraka, formerly LeRoi Jones, whose black nationalist poetry once engaged a younger, dashiki-wearing Crouch, snapped, “He’s a backward, asinine person,” before hanging up on Boynton. “I admire the brother’s candor,” West told Boynton. “But his abrasive style is so alienating that it tends to reinforce the polarization.” (And that was a year before their conversation at the Kennedy School.)

It’s true that Crouch’s blustery style and pugilistic spirit can sometimes get a little out of control. In another bit of Crouchian legend, he got fired after throwing down some street fighter justice on a Village Voice colleague who disagreed with his dislike of gangsta rap music — a brief but intense dust-up that led to the police being called and Crouch getting the ax. Crouch later described this as the best thing that could have happened to him, careerwise: “I want them to know that just because I write, doesn’t mean I can’t also fight,” he said.

More than a decade has passed since the Voice episode. But at an October 1998 event in Massachusetts, in a panel called “What Makes Black Music Black” at the Cambridge Multi-Cultural Arts Center, Crouch feinted and jabbed verbally with hip-hop proponent and Chris Rock mentor Nelson George. Before a slack-jawed audience of liberal do-gooders and New England Conservatory of Music students, Crouch called gangsta rappers “scum of the earth,” a phrase that sent George into a roof-raising tirade. “Maybe they should call him Stanley Grouch,” a white woman audience member whispered huffily at the evening’s end. All in a night’s work for Crouch, who has a curious way of intimidating women with his public persona and winning them over with gentlemanly attentiveness offstage.

But there is much more to Crouch than his contrarian image. Underneath the mask of Crouch the Grouch is a down-to-earth individual who would rather engage you in debate than cut you dead with pretensions of writerly superiority. He is one of the rare top-echelon literary figures who not only welcomes conversation with unknown young writers (he gives out his home office phone number and usually picks up when it rings), but is also wont to commandeer them for marathon swirls through his downtown universe of smoldering jazz clubs, big-portion restaurants and Runyonesque watering holes. He is cursed with the robust appetites and incorrigible waistline of one who has worked hard to attain life’s secular rewards — good food, good grog, good tobacco. Fortunately, he is also blessed with a healthy dose of the showman’s singular charm and the unshaken spirit of a true optimist.

(Full disclosure: Crouch has been a casual friend and unofficial mentor since 1987; he also contributed to a 1998 essay collection by black writers on Louis Farrakhan that I edited.) As a teacher, Crouch believes in the accessibility of knowledge and has honed the oral tradition (American and African) to a fine point.

Certainly, his bona fides are stunning. A MacArthur Foundation “genius” award in the early 1990s; his founding, along with Wynton Marsalis, of the hugely successful Jazz at Lincoln Center series; the nomination of “The All-American Skin-Game” for the National Book Award. His stumbles are also noteworthy, if only for their spectacularly public nature. Hired by CBS in January 1996, along with lefty cowgirl philosopher Molly Ivins, to provide point-counterpoint zing to the stodgy “60 Minutes” program, Crouch’s segments came off as stiff and forcibly contrarian. Anyone who knows Crouch beyond his troublemaker reputation could see how phony it was to set him up as the conservative bogeyman against Ivins’ liberal Pollyanna. Not surprisingly, executive producer Don Hewitt killed the bit in June 1996 after only eight airings.

His latest collection of critical essays, “Always in Pursuit,” is mainly an assortment of his recent newspaper and magazine columns (in contrast to “The All-American Skin Game,” which included a dozen remarkable speeches, eulogies and addresses), and left some readers wondering if Crouch was simply repeating the same notes.

Yet the book did nothing to detract from his peculiarly intriguing doctrine or his hard-won reputation as a Maileresque writer and a raconteur of notorious stamina. In the past few years, reporters from both the Baltimore Sun and the Washington Post who set out to profile Crouch remarked with a vague mixture of awe and dread that their interviews with the writer carried on hours longer than they’d bargained for. Although routinely and incorrectly described as a black conservative, Crouch calls himself a “radical pragmatist.” To the uninitiated, his philosophy might best be described as rigidly humanist. It centers on an unsentimental vision wherein we must fight the siren temptation to obsess about our (mostly superficial) differences, lest we miss the chance to embrace our (very real and very numerous) commonalities.

On that point, Crouch’s insistence on using the word “Negro” instead of “African-American” or “black” is his own little personal talisman, a way of stubbornly reinforcing his point that the nation’s historic “others” are indeed wholly indispensable creators, and perpetuators, of America’s cultural and political fabric. His take on America and democracy, a staple of hoity-toity ruminators from de Tocqueville to Baldwin, is fastened like a starfish to a blues and jazz motif. “I see Americans as people who play out variations on the same fundamental music,” Crouch offered in the introduction to “The All-American Skin Game,” a book he hoped would flush out the “things that we have in common, the things that sustain our improvement of discourse and policy [and] the obstacles that make it difficult for us to recognize the many improvisations that enrich our community.”

Crouch, who turned 53 in December, has become almost hokey about mentioning his humble beginnings, especially his adoration for his departed mother. Born in post-World War II Los Angeles to Emma Bea Crouch, a hard-working domestic with the heart and mind of “an aristocrat,” Crouch was an adolescent before he met his ne’er-do-well father, James Crouch. Thanks to Emma Bea, Crouch was a precocious if not particularly consistent student. He read the classics unprompted through junior and senior high schools, graduated, then frittered around at a couple of junior colleges before finding his way to California’s Claremont Colleges. In another legendary tale of Crouch cojones, he talked his way onto the faculty of Pomona College as a tenured English professor without so much as an undergraduate degree to call his own. It was the height of the student activist movement, and Crouch played the role of radical black militant like a pro. Only after moving to New York during the 1970s, where he began indulging his love of jazz, did his current intellectual outlook begin to take shape. He broke into literary criticism at publications like the Village Voice and the New Republic, and took up with artists like Marsalis, Murray and the legendary novelist Ralph Ellison. He married sculptor Gloria Nixon in the mid-1990s, a move that seems to have facilitated (or at least coincided with) the mellowing of his bullying instincts.

All the same, the pugilistic incidents are what make the best copy, and Crouch is not likely to engage in any obvious make-overs anytime soon. What he is likely to do at the dawn of the 21st century is to finally come across with a biography of Charlie Parker, a project currently in its 16th year and counting. (Crouch’s critics, among their other jibes, have long doubted that he can pull off the epic work.)

Beyond the literary backbiting and black intellectual ego scrapes, there’s a craggy integrity to Crouch’s career. You might wish he made nice more often, but it’s hard to argue with his achievements. He’s helped take the national dialogue on race and culture to a new level, paying tribute to his intellectual forebears and waving in the new with a combination of grit, talent and fearlessness. Not bad for a loudmouthed cultural opportunist.