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Wry Martinis (1997)

    American conservatives are doomed to suffer in squaredom for a simple reason (besides weak hair):
    their stance of Permanent Moral Disapproval. Whatever virtues this state may possess, hipness is not
    one of them. Fred MacMurray may be an admirable paterfamilias and a model of bourgeois
    rectitude, but he will not win the dance contest on Soul Train.

    The Right has a serious fun problem. Like evil runes possessed of a curious power, the words
    carved on the id of every teenager worth her salt -- sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll -- send conservatives
    into a howling, medieval fury. The inconvenient fact is that all hipness contains a spice of nihilism,
    a tiny but flavorful soupcon of who-gives-a-****, that is anathema to the Right. To the degree that
    conservative writers embrace Cool Style, they simply cease to be conservative.
           -REVIEW : of "Backward and Upward: The New Conservative Writing," edited by David Brooks (GARY KAMIYA, Salon)

That statement is, I suppose, fairly typical of how the Left views conservatives, and may in fact be largely true. But it misses two extremely salient points : (1) those who do embrace Cool Style cease to be humorous, after all, if you think it's perfectly fine to engage in wildly varied sexual experimentation, then 99% of the jokes ever told in the history of man, particularly those with sheep in them, no longer have punch lines; (2) no the Right isn't out having this sort of fun, we're home with our wives making jokes about the hipster doofuses that think that such behavior makes them cool. [Recall the hilarious Republican response to Ted Kennedy's 1988 Democratic convention speech, where he used the tagline "Where was George ?" Answer : Home in bed with Barbara, sober.] Humor, particularly satirical humor, by its very nature, requires you to take a pretty jaundiced view of humankind; it practically requires the stance of Permanent Moral Disapproval, which Kamiya finds so offensive. The natural result is that almost all of the humorous political writing in America today is being done by conservatives. The collection that is panned above, for instance, includes an embarrassment of riches, including Joe Queenan, PJ O'Rourke, Andrew Ferguson, and Christopher Buckley.

Wry Martinis meanwhile is a collection of twenty years worth of the writings of Christopher Buckley--an editor at Forbes FYI, regular contributor to the back page of The New Yorker, former speech writer to Vice President Bush, and the son of William F. Buckley. The book contains many funny pieces ranging from travel essays to book reviews. Among the funniest are his NY Times review of Tom Clancy's novel Debt of Honor, which is so scathing that it provoked a mini-feud between the two. It starts by citing Mark Twain :

    Somewhere, if memory serves, Mark Twain said of one of Henry James's books, "Once you put it
    down, you can't pick it up." "Debt of Honor," the eighth novel in Tom Clancy's oeuvre, is, at 766
    pages, a herniating experience.

And things get really ugly thereafter. One of Buckley's favorite devices, especially in his New Yorker bits, is to take one seemingly innocent item out of the news and then spin a comedic scenario around it. Among the factoids that get this treatment :

    * 'They both come to my house. We serve them a Martini. And we have an exchange between
        the two.'
            -Tom Brokaw in The New York Times, proposing an alternative presidential-debate format

    * A group of conservative political operatives is expected to announce today the launching of the
        Conservative TV Network, a 24-hour pay cable-television channel expected to debut in early
        1996.
            -USA Today

    * To save money, airlines in the United States are circulating less fresh air into the cabins of many
    airplanes.
            -The New York Times

These brief essays are generally very funny, but even better, the modus operandi set him up to perpetrate a terrific hoax. In Forbes FYI, he started out a piece with a seemingly similar blurb :

It has come to our attention through private channels that the Soviet government is preparing to
make a very unusual, indeed unprecedented, offering : the embalmed remains of V. I. Lenin.

The following fabrication proved so successful that the Soviet government was deluged with bids and Peter Jennings reported, and later angrily retracted, the story on ABC News.

These and the many other pieces make for a truly funny collection. It belongs on your shelf, in the midst of the collected works of H. L. Mencken, Tom Wolfe, Andrew Ferguson, and P.J. O'Rourke, and the other equally funny curmudgeons who have so masterfully turned the Human Tragedy into a Human Comedy.

(Reviewed:03-Apr-01)

Grade: (A-)

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Wry Martinis (1997)

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