Thank You for Smoking (Christopher Buckley)
Blood, Amos
/ t is a truism for our times that the power of satire to ridicule folly and humbug lags behind the power of folly and humbug to pretend that they are not ridiculous at all. Parody falls short of...
...Richard Dreyfuss's issues person was also on board, having given a presentation to the cabinet on Richard's feelings about health reform...
...Goode wants to score cheap points off this young man's suffering just so he can get his budget increased so he can tell more people what to do, well I just think that's really, really sad...
...Meanwhile, Republicans had a great time suggesting that Stark, Matsui, and other Democrats who could not join their colleague, Michael Andrews of Texas, in branding as "unconscionable" any tax of Amos Blood appears frequently in these pages...
...Parody falls short of reality...
...But my judgment may be clouded by dislike for anything which gives comfort to the anti-smoking Puritans...
...He recognized Barbra Streisand's issues person, whom he'd read had flown in to brief the National Security Council on Barbra's position on the developing Syrian situation...
...But now Representative Henry Waxman has done it in reality and has been hailed as a bold defender of the public health...
...Stark and Matsui, both Democrats, were speaking in favor of the lower tax but attempting to make up in rhetorical firepower for the fact that they needed the votes—on a health-care package!—of tobacco-state legislators for whom 45 cents a pack was the highest acceptable rate...
...What a laugh...
...For an eye-popping amount of money to be paid by the tobacco companies, the hot young stars of a new movie will be shown smoking...
...His colleagues are Bobby Jay Bliss of SAFETY, or the Society for the Advancement of Firearms and Effective Training of Youth (formerly the National Right to Bear Arms Committee) and Polly Bailey of the Moderation Council (formerly the National Association for Alcoholic Beverages...
...C71 78 The American Spectator October 1994...
...Nick meets regularly with two other lobbyists in what they good-naturedly call the "MOD [for "Merchants of Death"j squad...
...There was a lot of traffic back and forth between D.C...
...just beneath contempt...
...He is aware of what he is doing, and sometimes hates himself for it...
...Whatever its shortcomings, the novel scores a big success in making the ridiculous look utterly like itself...
...while Rep...
...these days...
...The man made it sound as though product placeTHANK YOU FOR SMOKING Christopher Buckley Random House /272 pages / $22 reviewed by AMOS BLOOD The American Spectator October 1994 77 ment was crucial to character development...
...Buckley's satire manages to stay fresh and funny by averting its gaze, slightly—away from the appalling moral humbuggery of our elected representatives and towards the language and the manners of Washington flacks and Hollywood producers and rich captains of provincial industry...
...Fortney "Pete" Stark of California called the kingpins of the tobacco industry "worse than criminals" (bad indeed...
...Nick is in Hollywood to negotiate a deal for "product placement...
...In debating whether to raise the tax by $1.25 a pack or only 45 cents, Rep...
...But the most delicious of Buckley's scenes come out of Hollywood: First Class was full...
...Thank You for Smoking tells the story of Nick Naylor, "chief smokesman" for the tobacco industry, who is a brilliant improviser of public relations offensives but who becomes the victim of an intra-office plot...
...Robert Matsui, also of California—who claims to be a sort of tobacco orphan, since both his parents died of lung cancer—said that manipulation of the nicotine content of cigarettes was "a criminal offense" and that those said to have done it were "not really American citizens...
...Jeff Megall, the superagent with whom Nick is negotiating, is perhaps Buckley's most perfectly observed character...
...Nick's great triumph occurs when he appears on the "Oprah Winfrey Show" with several anti-tobacco fanatics and a personable young man who is dying of lung cancer...
...Or consider the debates in the House on health care reform, which many seem to think can be paid for, in large part, by new federal taxes on cigarettes...
...But for a member of the federal government to come on this show and lecture about cancer, when that same government for nearly fifty years has been producing atomic bombs, twenty-five thousand of them, as long as we're throwing numbers around, Mis-ter Sta-tistics, bombs capable of giving every single person on this planet, man, woman, and child, cancers so awful, so ghastly and untreatable, so, so, so incurable, that medical science doesn't even have a name for them yet...
...and L.A...
...If Mr...
...Call me Ishmael, and hand me a Coca-Cola...
...Buckley has a particularly good eye for Washington ways of euphemism...
...Product placement is to Megall a matter of money being "all along a byproduct of the creative decision," and, he says smugly, "It's nice when that happens...
...less than $1.25 were "accomplices" in the criminal acts they so excoriated...
...At least the latter have the excuse that no one ever expected anything of them other than that their exquisitely nuanced points of view should be calculated out of dollars and cents...
...In this nightmarish situation he manages to turn aside the attack onsmoking by singling out the government's health spokesman as the object of a counteroffensive...
...True, it seems to me too easy for Buckley inthe end to make him a conscientious convert to the anti-smoking cause—and the plot intrigue by which this turnabout is effected is ultimately irrelevant and distracting...
...How far can this be considered parody when both Dreyfuss and Miss Streisand actually do employ "issues persons...
...t sounds even less plausible than the situation in Christopher Buckley's new novel...
...Buckley claims not to have known when he was writing the book that precisely this kind of thing has in fact gone on for years in the movie business...
...While the Hollywood types and the tycoons and the "public interest" spokesmen are full to the back teeth with humbug, Nick has a solid center of genuineness...
...Not long ago, no novelist could have portrayed a powerful subcommittee chairman summoning the heads of the seven largest tobacco companies solemnly to testify before Congress that they do not believe cigarettes a hazard to health...
...Nick is impressed...
Vol. 27 • October 1994 • No. 10
