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My Goodness : A Cynic's Shortlived Search for Sainthood (2000)

    In a 1996 Washington Post op-ed piece, I wished out loud that the director of Mr. Holland's Opus
    had ended his film the same way as Braveheart, with Richard Dreyfuss getting his entrails ripped
    out while a cast of thousands cheered.
        -Joe Queenan, My Goodness

For many years now, Joe Queenan has made a handsome living by, as above, joyfully eviscerating actors, politicians, writers, singers, businessmen, and any number of other eminently deserving members of America's profoundly self-absorbed cultural and corporate "elite." But a couple of years ago, as he reached the epicenter of his middle age, he realized that he had built his career on being a hatchet man. And, as if that fact alone weren't bad enough, he's mostly performed this dastardly deed in magazines of a Right-Wing bent. Luckily though, he was blessed with an epiphany that made him realize the error of his ways, an epiphany in a toothpaste box no less. Having purchased a tube of Tom's of Maine toothpaste, he found enclosed a note, apparently standard issue in their products, detailing the company's mission and extolling the Anti-Vivisection movement. While his faithful readers would expect such an unpleasant discovery to lead naturally into one of Queenan's patented screeds, it instead triggered a bout of painful soul-searching and personal introspection :

    When I conjured up a mental image of Tom of Maine rhapsodizing about his cruelty-free products
    or Ben & Jerry marketing a flavor that promoted world peace or Sting doing a benefit concert to
    help save the rain forest, what I saw were happy, vibrant, upbeat people. When I looked at my own
    personality, what I saw was a shriveled-up old prune. And I was dog-tired of being a shriveled-up
    old prune.

And so he set out to become not merely good, in the way that Tom of Maine and Ben & Jerry are good, but ostentatiously good, in the way that Tom & Ben & Jerry are too. So he set out on a hilarious journey of the soul into the very bowels of fin de siecle political correctness. Besides discontinuing the kind of character assassination journalism that had been his stock in trade, Queenan did things like : start using La Leche League checks, a socially conscious credit card, and a phone service that contributes a portion of your bill to "worthwhile causes; renting only movies, and playing only cds, featuring artists (like Robin Williams, Alec Baldwin, Sting, Bonnie Raitt, etc.) who devote themselves to humanitarian causes; personally responding to all of the letters of complaint he'd received from readers and victims of his profiles over the years; attending consciousness raising events like a Mumia rally in Philadelphia; setting up an official website where he expressed remorse for prior attacks; and so on; but most especially he started performing "RAKs" and "SABs", random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty.

Much, maybe even close to all, of this is very funny, proving once again, if anyone still doubts it, that comedy is fundamentally conservative, as he takes on the prevailing New Age, environmentalist zeitgeist head on and pretty much annihilates it. But here, as in The Unkindest Cut, it is not the outright belly laughs and the antic misadventures which make it a must read, but the less overt message which emerges from beneath the satirical front. In this case, Queenan has struck open the most important thing that we need to understand about this quintessentially modern form of "goodness" : it is not the quality of a persons actions, nor the results which flow from those actions, which ultimately matter in this politically correct universe, it suffices merely to act in the prescribed fashion and to have it be known that you have done so. Sure, it would be nice if protesting U.S. involvement in the Balkans would make the world a better place, but if it instead merely results in more dead Bosnians, that is not the protesters' problem. They've already received that warm fuzzy feeling that comes from "doing the right thing" and by doing it publicly, they've already received recognition for being the kind of people who do the right thing.

It is, of course, possible that Queenan has his tongue firmly planted in his cheek the whole time, but I assume that he's being sincere when he talks about the easy kind of self-satisfaction that his experiment often delivered, the cheap sense that just saying you care or that you are driven by compassion is sufficient to make you "good." This is a lesson that conservatives fail to learn at their own peril. We of the Right tend to believe that ideas have consequences and that they should be judged by those consequences. But when we speak of consequences we mean the end results, the final effects on the problems that those ideas are intended to solve. What Queenan is pointing out is that on the Left ideas are measured by how they make the doer feel, not on how they effect the done to. Conservatives can argue until they are blue in the face that Welfare spending created a permanent underclass, dependent on government largesse, and so must be considered to have worsened, rather than bettered, the lives of those it was supposed to help. But that's all beside the point. The Left considers itself to have demonstrated that it cares about the poor simply by spending the money in the first place. What do they care what happened once they'd satisfied their own emotional needs? Liberals did the good thing and showed they care when they spent the money; the actual results be damned.

Thankfully for all of us, Joe Queenan has returned to his old, curmudgeonly self, having finally realized that he was doing just as much, if not more, to make the world a better place as a slash and burn essayist as he did as a soy shake drinking, oh-so-sensitive, Oprahfied wuss. Plus, performing his specialized kind of driveby journalism pays a whole lot better than does social activism. But we are all a little wiser for his experience, and that's a good thing.

(Reviewed:06-Jul-01)

Grade: (A)

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My Goodness : A Cynic's Shortlived Search for Sainthood (2000)

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