THE STANDARD READER
The Standard Reader Books in Brief Director's Cut by Roger L. Simon (Atria, 241 pp., $23). No one opening the eighth adventure of California private eye Moses Wine can avoid noticing its politics....
...Jon L. Breen No Uncertain Terms by William Safire (Simon & Schuster, 370 pp., $25...
...William Safire has been writing his weekly New York Times column "On Language" for nearly twenty-five years, and No Uncertain Terms is the fourteenth book to be culled from these weekly disquisitions on English grammar, usage, syntax, etymology, and, as often as not, tact...
...The mass of vogue words emanating from Washington alone reveals our political culture to be in equal parts clever and witless, and Safire shows relentlessly how much the everyday language we speak owes to political spinning, though he doesn't neglect the damage done by technology and entertainment...
...Then there are those phrases the language can't seem to shake...
...For some, Simon's humor may go too far...
...Writes the impish Safire: "You cannot languor away...
...We've been languoring away here in Washington," said tube-hound attorney William Ginsburg back in Lewinsky days...
...Safire loiters through the minefield of "weapons of mass destruction...
...George Bush's less artful linguistic sins also take their hits...
...Moses hasn't really changed his political stripes all that much, and the main target of his creator's satire is one everybody enjoys ridiculing: the motion picture industry...
...Along with the laughs, Simon delivers well-conceived action and suspense, and while this is far from a formal puzzle in the Ellery Queen or Agatha Christie manner, the final surprise is fair...
...Safire traces it through the Truman-Atlee-King declaration of 1945 that proposed "eliminating from national armaments atomic weapons and all other major weapons adaptable to mass destruction," the author of which seems to have been MIT engineer Vannevar Bush...
...Here's a litmus test: The Grand Rabbi of Prague, a wannabe screenwriter, is found murdered clutching a script entitled The Protocols of the Elders of Zion—The Motion Picture...
...The same with the slippery dismissal "to move on," the brusque "get over it," and the omnipresent "actually" and "totally...
...After its adoption by the United Nations soon afterward, the phrase stuck...
...A Hollywood friend asks Wine to go to Prague, where an American independent film shoot is being menaced by anonymous threats, possibly in anti-Semitic response to the film's Holocaust theme...
...On the other hand, through such mistakes we grow the English languish...
...So, for instance, he revisits Bill Clinton's dodgy use of "is" and "alone...
...In just this way does the language get grown—and overgrown...
...When the director is disabled in a terrorist attack, the inexperienced Wine actually takes over directing in addition to his security duties...
...Some had guessed it's an adaptation of a Russian term from the Cold War meaning roughly "a massive air assault...
...See "NU-ky-ler," a mispronunciation he shares with Jimmy Carter...
...In the first paragraph, Wine, the radical Berkeley grad who "had espoused every so-called progressive cause from anti-nuke to pro-choice to saving the West Indian manatee," admits to finding himself agreeing with John Ashcroft in our post-September 11 world...
...If you find that amusing, you will definitely enjoy Director's Cut...
...The novel's climax comes at the Sundance Film Festival, giving Simon added opportunities to skewer the foibles of the independent film world...
...As far as the eye can see" is a bit of rhetorical overreach we should avoid, as is "chilling effect...
...Tracy Lee Simmons...
...The initial boos from the left—for whom Wine has been a hero ever since his first appearance as the one radical detective in the 1973 The Big Fix—and tentative cheers from the right will have faded by the end of the book, when both are laughing too hard to care...
Vol. 8 • July 2003 • No. 43
