IVashington in Pieces
Nollson, John
WASHINGTON IN PIECES John Nollson / Doubleday / $11.95 Theo Lippman, Jr. I write a humor column for the Baltimore Sun. Many times an incident like this occurs: I write a piece of pure nonsense. An...
...is an editorial writer for the Baltimore Sun...
...An acquaintance then says to me, "So Ronald Reagan played a gorilla in the 1932 version of Tarzan...
...I fell for it in the first three instances, but saw through it when I got to this excerpt from the pointil-list-columnist: "Pointillist commentary is distinguished by frequent use of the word 'point,' as in the following example'': Politicians who make this point overlook several other points...
...I don't want to know what he's doing there...
...It had to do with how landholdings should be surveyed for the purpose of computing the local property tax...
...I'm not that dumb...
...Not even the William P. Clark nomination prepared me for this...
...Jeee-susssl A humorist in the Pentagon...
...That sounds like a criticism, and it is...
...Now, I knew there was no such gallery...
...1 called the senatorial office where he worked (not Jackson's...
...a mood of cautious optimism tempered by an air of prudent pessimism...
...The Proposition on the ballot read as follows: 'In any right triangle, shall the square of the hypotenuse be equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides?'" Some of the more obvious and amusing pieces in this collection have to do with Senator Larethan Jerome Wimbol who served 114 years as senator, ran for president every four years, took every position "including all...
...One cannot tell the difference between real Reston and Noll-son-Reston (or between Reagan and Lippman-Reagan...
...I said...
...The answer, which is obvious once you see it, only came to me when I was reading John Noll-son's essay, "The Art of the Possible...
...I mean, the biggest joke of all would be to sneak serious stuff in, right...
...This is an awkward posture for reading humor...
...The ultimate erasure of the line between nonsense and sense...
...Is in...
...I never called him...
...Noll-son is a pseudonym...
...When I sit down to be amused, I don't want to be accompanied by an imp of alertness...
...This is a point worth pointing out...
...The line Theo Lippman, Jr...
...In this he traces the referendum back beyond the Progressives of turn-of-the-century America to the Greeks of the Golden Age "when the first Proposition, Proposition Alpha, was submitted to the voters...
...Life is tough enough in a democracy without not knowing whether some bit of lunacy is lunacy...
...To make you laugh at reality...
...And then I saw the light...
...But he may be making policy...
...It tells of a "Georgetown Gallery of Political Commentary" in which the works of pundits are sold...
...Herbert Hoover said we should laugh at the Depression, but at Doomsday...
...So you have to be on your guard...
...And so on in excerpts from "Fauves," "surrealists," "pointillists," "abstract expressionists," "cubists," and "pop artists...
...The dust jacket says he had...
...As a matter of fact, so interchangable are reality and whimsy that after I read the pointillist excerpt and moved on to the other more subtle "excerpts," I resumed believing these were the real thing...
...But I finally learned his real name...
...The Department of Defense...
...His "Old Master" wrote "There is in the Nation's Capitol, as seen from here in the nearby countryside...
...I never knew that before...
...He's no longer here," a person with a trace of Hispanic accent said...
...Therefore for me, the best Nollson is the fiction that is obvious in every detail-the burlesques, such as his wicked broadside on participatory democracy called "Propositions...
...But I at first believed that Nollson was using real excerpts from the works of real pundits to satirize political commentary...
...And so on in perfect Restonesque brush strokes...
...between satire and reality has vanished in Washington (and thus in America...
...I suspected it was Henry Jackson he was parodying, but as an investigative humorist (a rare thing), I leave nothing to mere suspicion...
...in the Kamasutra," was arrested for hiring wetbacks as legislative assistants, and so on...
...Not an easy assignment...
...Do you know where he can be reached...
...Or, "I think you're right about making it a capital offense for a black to murder another black, but only probation-before-verdict for a black to murder a white.'' How can this be ? I always wonder...
...He may only be writing speeches and handouts...
...I decided to find out which senator Nollson had worked for...
...I'm going right out and apologize to my own readers for subtleties...
...And so, naturally, I have to say of Nollson's work in this and the 44 other essays that appear in this book (most first appeared in this magazine), that while they are often very funny, you can always be sure...
...The first of these points is point one, which is to say, the basic point, from which all other points follow: Politics is not pointless, but depends ultimately on one's point of view...
Vol. 14 • October 1981 • No. 10
