Two Steps Ahead of the Thought Police, John Leo
Hoyt, Robert G.
KEEP RUNNING TWO STEPS AHEAD OF THE THOUGHT POLICE Essays John Leo Simon & Schuster, $22, 319 pp. Robert O. Hoyt First, disclosures. (1) Years ago, the author of these essays was an editor of...
...the column was often seasoned with jalapeno and had a lot to do with the paper's early success...
...1) Years ago, the author of these essays was an editor of this magazine...
...Today, insofar as either of them can be labeled, Wills is the more liberal and Leo has gone back to his roots...
...3) Aeons (well, three decades) ago, the author wrote a column for the National Catholic Reporter, then edited by this reviewer...
...Knowing all this, even after learning that I disagree with from one-to two-sevenths of John Leo's opinions, the canny reader will know better than to expect a hatchet job here, and will rightly expect to get some data no other reviewer will provide...
...three or four hours later he would dictate the column by phone from New York to Kansas City...
...Leo thinks in 750- to 1,000-word chunks, each one a seamless entity...
...The jacket copy for Two Steps doesn't mention Leo's early newspaper experience, his work with Commonweal and NCR, or his stint as editor of the Davenport, Iowa, Catholic Messenger, which was already one of the country's best diocesan papers before he arrived but got more reader-friendly after he took over...
...The runner was called out...
...Most of those targets are apostles or disciples of current intellectual fads and movements: victimology, rights-talk, judicialized politics (e.g., Roe v. Wade), the creation of new exonerative addictions ('Twinkles made me do it"), multiculturalism, de-constructionism, vulgarity as chic, ultra-ultra versions of feminism, agitprop art...
...As for style: Some people think in sentences, some in paragraphs...
...Most of the pieces in Two Steps appeared originally in Leo's U.S...
...one of the third baseman's hands got broken...
...In the early legs of this journey Leo departed from his inborn moderate conservatism...
...I know because when he did a column for NCR he usually had to be reminded of the deadline on deadline day...
...Besides which, somewhere in his brain there is a figure-of-speech machine that grinds out a steady product line of nicely turned metaphors, similes, and other tropes that divert the reader while conveying the intended message...
...he does his skewering with cool wit, not foaming-at-the-mouth rage...
...News column, "On Society": a bland name for a highly spiced weekly serving, but broad enough to cover its writer's range of interests...
...late Cardinals Spellman of New York and Mclntyre of Los Angeles had reason to know...
...on NCR's opinion page his column, "Thinking It Over," usually appeared to the left of "Old and New,'- written by the paper's house conservative, Garry Wills...
...4) Finally, once upon a sunlit day in Sag Harbor, Long Island, New York, this same reviewer, in his role as baserunner in a soft-ball game, rammed his stomach, which was then firm, into the hands of this same author, who was playing third base and had just taken a throw from the outfield...
...It always fitted the allotted space exactly, was reasonable, readable, and witty, needed no editing, and was sometimes devastating, as the 38...
...News and World Report...
...One could say that Leo is engaged in the defense of intellectual and linguistic standards, but it would be more Leonine to say that he specializes in skewering inane or fuzzy ideas and inflated, meaning-starved, euphemistic, or otherwise phony rhetoric...
...2) Months ago, he offered to send the journal's editor a fax of a piece he wanted her to see, was told that Commonweal didn't have a fax machine, asked what the cursed things cost, sent a check...
...He would say, "Right...
...I suspect that at least some of his targets couldn't get through this book without laughing out loud at least once, even while bleeding...
...That may make him sound curmudgeonly, but no...
...It is not clear to the reviewer that this incident has been forgotten or forgiven...
...Such as: John Leo is a natural-born columnist...
...From Davenport he moved to New York, first to Commonweal, then—over these many years—to the New York Times, then Time, now U.S...
Vol. 121 • November 1994 • No. 20
