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March 1999 - Volume 31 Issue 3

"Never, ever review one's friends' books," Jonathan Yardley writes of an apparently unhappy episode in his long friendship with the late J. Anthony Lukas. It's probably a good rule, though I do think it is absolutely essential to review one's enemies' books. But I'm going to proceed nonetheless, because I want to say for the record, for whatever it's worth, that this, his most recent collection of his Monday morning Washington Post columns establishes him - yet again! - as America's most durable bull detector. Yardley is to cant, pretension, and fatuity as electric bug zappers are to summer moths. Susan Cheever writing yet another book about the ordeal of being John Cheever's daughter? Zzzzzap. Puff of smoke. Maureen Dowd trying to score a few easy points off the hide of David Brinkley? "Oh, get off it!" Zzzap. David Remnick of the New Yorker, slyly, engagingly attempting to insert a pedestal between Howard Stern and the dirt, so as to elevate him into a figure of cultural significance? Not so fast, pal. Barbra Streisand, peddling her Weltanschauung at Harvard? Puh-leeze. And don't get him started on Joyce Maynard.

Whether this exigence is the result of Yardley's flinty Wasp temperament, or of his natural instinct to ascend the pulpit or wield the ferrule (he is descended from a long line of preachers and teachers), or simply of crankiness born of having to write these columns on Sunday, while the rest of us are scratching our terry-robed behinds and mixing Bloody Marys - who can say? But these dissatisfactions have provided grand entertainment and wisdom over the years. Many an otherwise joyless Monday a.m. have been rendered more tolerable by his well-reasoned, witty fulminations over the continuing, appalling decline of - just about everything.

I remember the morning I found this delicious lead staring up at me from the breakfast table, and was delighted to find it again here:

Among the institutions upon which Washington prides itself, surely special honor must be accorded the National Prayer Breakfast. Held but once a year - evidently on the implicit understanding that once a year is quite sufficient - this August occasion assembles under one roof the most extensive collection of duplicity, of human hypocrisy, that has ever been gathered together in Washington, with the possible exception of when Richard Nixon prayed alone.

You could clone the whole of Yardley's sensibility from this one strand of DNA. It bears all the distinctive markers: his continuing dudgeon over Nixon, whom he seems to loathe even more in death than he did in life; Chestertonian irony; Mencken's lingo. (Yardley, like Mencken, lived in Baltimore for many years, and picked up much of the Master's 19th-century idiom.) Nixon never failed to raise his temperature past the boiling point. While the rest of us - even those who had hated and despised him and worked to impeach him - were blubbering over his bier, and a National Day of Mourning was declared in the general interests of reconciliation, Yardley was holed up, smoke and fire pouring out of every orifice, banging out a column titled, "National Day of What?" Reconciliation? He would have none of it. "It won't wash, at least not in this Maytag."

Yardley's politics are elusive, but with the aid of modern satellite navigation systems, can be tracked. You never quite know whom he'll be flaying alive on any given Monday, which makes picking up the Post that day all the more exhilarating. In his introduction, he tells us that he was madly for Adlai back in the '50s, and that he worked hard on behalf of the civil rights movement in the South, where he began his distinguished newspaper career. He was pro-Great Society and anti-Vietnam. In so many words, a card-carrying liberal. (How satisfying to type those words!)

His Damascus moment came in, of all places, Harvard Yard. He happened to be there in the late '60s on a Nieman Fellowship when the place was trashedóby many of the people who are now running the country. "This, with all its repercussions, eventually became the shaping event in my adult life," he writes. "I was appalled by the wholesale repudiation of authority and tradition not merely by the pampered youth of the middle class but by the adults, professors, university administrators, journalists, intellectuals, politicians, who followed in their train." A new definition of a conservative: a liberal who watched America get mugged at Harvard.

You can see the crosshairs of this animus on almost every page here, in his excoriation of the tenured, Jew-baiting Professor Lionel Jeffries of City College in New York, in his contempt for political correctness as practiced in the universities or at the Smithsonian, and in his detestation of the current literary vogue for what he calls "exhibitionistic narcissism," as practiced by, among others, author Kathryn Harrison (The Kiss), a trend that he traces to the fiction of Joyce and the psychology of Uncle Sigmund.

Politically, his disdain is wide enough to embrace both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. I demur from his criticism of the former, which I find wrong-headed and attitudinal, but I heartily join in his contumely for the present administration. The ferocity of his anger for the present occupants of the White House is unsurpassed by that of anyone I know in the vast right-wing conspiracy. I must, too, object to his condescension to George Bush, whom he repeatedly belittles as a feckless, patrician ninny. (Here let me declare my own allegiance: I worked for Bush; I like and admire the guy.) Yardley goes after him for the infamous supermarket bar-code scanner incident, over which vast hay was made of the fact that the President was unfamiliar with the device. "He's so out of touch with the daily lives of his constituents, he doesn't even know how they go about buying the food they put on their tables." This particular bit of dudgeon seems to me disproportionate. Was that other patrician president of the 20th century, Franklin Roosevelt, familiar with the supermarket cash registers in his time? When it came to technology, Bush had his priorities right. I submit that history is better off for his having known more about what kind of missile to use on Baghdad than about the Barcode Thing.

But this cavil aside, Yardley's scorn is as smart as the bombs we let fly into Iraq whenever impeachment worries threaten to overwhelm. He has laser sighting, and in the main his targets deserve what they get. What really gets Yardley's endocrine system pumping is the culture of celebrity and self-absorption. In a town where people stampede over their grandmothers - Colson, thou shouldst be living at this hour! - to get to the nearest TV studio in order to share their views on anything at all, it is refreshing to discover that there lurks among us one dissenter from the Me-Me-Me Culture.

It being my deep conviction that almost anything; lawn-mowing, house-painting, septic-tank-drainingóis a better way to spend Sunday morning than listening to bigfoot Washington journalists mouth off at each other, I have never seen more than snippets of This Week, and those involuntarily. But even on limited evidence it is abundantly plain that it, and all the other dreadful programs like it, has far less to do with the serious discussion of public issues than with the project of egos and, if they can be called that, e-personalities.'

These are lovely sentiments, too rarely uttered in Our Town, for the simple reason that everyone wants to be invited to go on these shows. Who among the chattering classes, has dared, say, to utter the rogue opinion that Larry King ought to be made to write a 100-word essay apologizing for enabling the presidential candidacy of Ross Perot? (Make that a 1000-word essay.) Yardley does not aspire to rub shoulders with such savant luminaries as Mort Zuckerman on The McLaughlin Group; he does not crave the good opinion of Maureen Dowd. (Indeed, he calls her the Times' "Vampira in residence.") How liberating it must be. I must try it sometime.

His greatest contempt - we'll get to the things he actually professes to like in a moment - is reserved for anything with the word "self" in front of it, as in "the self-indulgence and self-promotion that have become the distinguishing characteristics of American journalism in these fin de sicle years." If you guessed that he was talking about Joyce Maynard, go to the head of the class. On the subject of Barbra Streisand's big, big speech at Harvard (scene of the Ur-crime), he is at his most banal-expulsive:

She can feel any old thing she wants to feel and she can even pretend that her feelings are thoughts, but none of this entitles her to be taken seriously as anything except an entertainer, and not very seriously as that. Were her self-regard just a tiny bit smaller than it is, she would realize that her performance at Harvard was just that: a star turn. Were her ego really under control, she'd understand that Harvard was using her every bit as much as she was using Harvard, that each, in permitting its gaudy light to be shed upon the other, was merely engaging in an act of reflective self-regard. This being her stock in trade, it must have seemed like just another day at the office.

Paragraphs like that keep one mumbling to the missus through a mouthful of Corn Toasties: Hehhun, yagoddareddis! [Trans: "Hey, honey, you've got to read this!"] This particular one appeared in February of 1995, and you know, it holds up pretty well, not bad at all for deadline newspaper stuff.

I said I'd try to mention things that Yardley likes, rather than deplores, but I seem to be running out of space. There are some lovely pieces on baseball and his beloved Baltimore Orioles, though since the publication of this book, he appears to have fallen out of love there, repelled finally by what big-money and TV have wrought on his once-treasured pastime. The section entitled "Ave Atque Vale" contains some genuinely lovely and moving tributes to dead friends and acquaintances, among them Walker Percy and Frederick Exley, about whom Yardley has written a superb biography. In the pages of this section we get glimpses of the warm heart that beats beneath the chain mail. Or whatever, as Bob Dole would say. Perhaps that same affection - for country, culture, old-fashioned standards of honor, honesty, and decencyóis implicit in all his writing: Only someone who cares this deeply for the pageant could be moved to such gorgeous indignation by its continuing failures.

 

Christopher Buckley's new novel, Little Green Men, will be published by Random House in April. It will not be reviewed in the Post by Jonathan Yardley.