Waxing Wroth

...I think I can safely say that I was able to lay the groundwork for new oppressions and injustices and to sow seeds of bitterness and hatred between the races, the generations and the social classes that hopefully will plague the American people for years to come ". By this point, though...

...Tricky is assassinated??drowned in a plastic bag??and we see him finally in Hell, "on the comeback trail," campaigning against Satan in a coming election and organizing the forces of wickedness in deadly combat against the Kingdom of Righteousness Among his qualifications, he points out that "not even Satan, I think, with the support of all his legions, would claim that he could bring a nation with a strong democratic tradition and the highest standard of living in the world to utter ruination in only a thousand days...

...Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness " Since the Nixon thought and rhetoric are crammed with such pompous obliquities, it is strange that Roth should neglect them in so many pages of Our Gang He substitutes episodic distortion and deformity for the much more difficult satiric weapon of rhetorical deflation, and what emerges often seems more juvenile than astringent...

...Since such a satirist's main device is wildly unconstrained exaggeration, he must also be funny, and this Philip Roth almost consistently fails to be in the hurriedly slapped-together Out Gang (Random House, 200 pp , $5 95) A group of loosely connected scatter-shot dialogues and speeches that aim to devastate through ridicule the Nixon Administration and its attendant politicians and journalists, Roth's effort at angry burlesque is so empty of genuine wit and effective comic inspiration that I wondered, for example, just what book Anthony Burgess ("brilliant satire") could have been talking about...

...The purpose and content of satire, I need scarcely say, are criticism—sometimes bludgeoning, sometimes insinuatingly subtle—of sham respectability, self-inflated virtue shrouding hidden vices, embezzled credibility, pretentious morality, all fakery and phoniness are grist to the satirist Yet in order to succeed, as the Harvard critic David Worcester has pointed out, satire "must practice the art of persuasion and become proficient with the tools of that art" Rhetorical sleight-of-hand is one of the most important of these tools, but it is not readily discerned in Our Gang, where Roth frequently lapses into such foam-rubber stuffing as "So the blah blah blah blah of state has been passed Blah blah blah blah blah has ended and the republic that blah blah blah blah blah blah reason '" The echolalia goes on for 19 lines And the Vice President's pounding blarney is rendered in the witless gibberish of "a cackledooper without a predipitous, or, likewise, a caloodian without a prepre-goratory predation ' Grimly unfunny, this has the castigating force of a broken popgun In the days of the golfing general, Oliver Jensen wrote a version of the Gettysburg Address in Eisenhowerese that brilliantly demonstrates what Roth lacks as a parodist, the ability to mimic a public style with deadly authority "I haven't checked these figures but 87 years ago, I think it was, a number of individuals organized a governmental set-up here in this country I believe it covered certain Eastern areas, with this idea they were following up based on a sort of national independence arrangement and the program that every individual is just as good as every other individual We want to pay our tribute to those loved ones, those departed individuals who made the supreme sacrifice here on the basis of their opinion about how this thing ought to be handled " The clout comes from a slyly mocking verisimilitude, and no amount of "perfectly clear" in Tricky's rhetoric can achieve Jensen's brilliant precision of tone Not long ago, the President's press secretary, Ron Ziegler, not only managed to confuse flout and flaunt but indignantly denied that the words have any recognizable difference When ignorance verges on nonsense, the satirist should move in for the kill But ours seems a time strangely poverty-stricken in satire One looks in vain for great satire poems by contemporary poets in the Childe Harold mood, say, of the Auden-MacNeice Letters from Iceland of 1937 Humor these days runs to the attenuated malice of the putdown, which is to satire as a banana peel is to an epigram What is it about the present day that makes for such paucity of good satiric writing that Roth's dud can be acclaimed so extravagantly7 Perhaps when standards are crumbling and vanishing, and seriousness is universally suspect??when anything goes in a world of negligent hedonism??the difference between sham and real so crucial to satirical art has become hopelessly blurred The only targets that still provide much of a challenge exist, as Philip Roth has rightly sensed, in the arena of political bombast In a recent interview Roth declared "My purpose is not to bring others around to my point of view, but rather to turn my own indignation and disgust from raw, useless emotion into comic art " Perhaps this very detachment accounts for the feebleness of Our Gang Great satire derives much of its vigor and power from the impulse to persuasion, without the drive of that commitment, it is neither comedy nor art...

...On the simplest level, the derogatory names he fashions for his targets—Trick E Dixon, Secretary Lard, Attorney General Malicious, Lyin' B Johnson, Mr Asshck, J Edgar Heehaw??are less witty than high-school kids who grumble at reading Barnaby Drudge...

...Roth has sought to give a new demonstration of both the universal and the political charges brought...

...Swift and Orwell??Swift's great passage in Gulliver's Travels about "that Faculty of lying, so perfectly well understood, and so universally practiced among human Creatures," and Orwell's by now classic remarks on the debasements of political language, "designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind " In his disgust with the slippery equivocation and gray-flannel deceitfulness of Washington rhetoric...

...Writers & Writing WAXING WROTH BY PEARL K BELL Contrary to popular relief, not all Satire is funny or meant to be—who could possibly laugh at Swift's nauseated portrait of the Yahoos9 But in freewheeling, minutely topical political satire one has to be more than enraged, or irreverent, or blasphemous, or scurrilous, or blisteringly contemptuous...

...Nor can we take Our Gang simply to be an explosive escape 'valve for Roth's fury at Nixonian doublethink and doubletalk, the working off of a boiling anger, for he clearly intends the book to take its place in a formidable literary tradition He chooses for his epigraphs the words of two master satirists...

...The heart of this small book is a gassy Presidential address to the nation Thousands of Boy Scouts have marched on the White House waving angry posters against the President's encouragement of cohabitation to make fetuses, and Tricky manages to explain in high-flown rectitude why three of them were killed by the soldiers sent in to break up the demonstration, and why United States military forces have invaded Denmark and dropped a nuclear bomb on Copenhagen Hasn't the pro-pornography government of that country had "territorial designs upon the continental United States ever since the eleventh century...

...And hasn't a subversive black baseball player, "trying to undermine the youth of this country by destroying baseball," taken refuge in Copenhagen7 After these great feats of leadership and sophistry...

...Roth is no longer writing satire??neither comic ingenuity nor literary skill is necessary for invective, abuse and malediction, however justified these hot coals may be One does not satirize cruelty and injustice, one attacks them head on In writing Tricky's speeches in hell, Roth forgets the lesson that he originally drew from Orwell "In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible...

...by Swift and Orwell, but it doesn't work The names, turns of phrase, and hyperbolic absurdities he has contrived for his satire have neither the moral intensity of Swift nor the annihilating clarity of Orwell...

...They should be brilliant verbal caricatures, as they often are in Restoration comedy (Joseph Surface, Mr Pinchwife, Mrs Candour), but Roth has lazily made do with the first jokey variations that came to mind, and the result is hopelessly flat His episodic inversions and distortions of devious reality are not much better In the first chapter, Roth takes his cue from an actual speech against abortion in which the President declared that "surely, the unborn have rights also, recognized in law, recognized even in principles expounded by the United Nations' Employing many a "perfectly clear" and "make no mistake," Tricky wiggles with snake's logic toward a startling declaration "a proposed constitutional amendment that would extend the vote to the unborn in time for the '72 elections In this Administration the fetuses and embryos of America have at last found then voice " The satiric exaggeration, however, leaves probability??and point??so far behind that Roth loses sight of them altogether, and the joke fizzles before it can fly...