PoliticsNew York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, whose new book centres on George W. Bush, comes equipped with a first-class bullshit detector while Graydon Carter's sermon on the same topic is high on sobriety and low on entertainment
Every American male who has ever done time in a New England prep school will have met somebody like George W. Bush. He's the Unapologetic Asshole Bully (to be elegant about it) you always come to fear-and-loathe: the not-too-bright scion of a very well-heeled Daddy who has been raised in a country club milieu and has developed a certain rich kid's arrogance to make up for his lack of intellectual prowess. More tellingly, he's genuinely proud of his lack of perspicacity - just as he delights in his ability to ridicule the eggheads who secretly make him feel insecure, and at whom he always snaps his towel in the locker room.
And when it comes to any sense of a world larger than his own narrow tunnel-vision . . .
Cut! I just wrote the above paragraph in one fast angry burst - because when it comes to the 43rd President of the US, I cannot feel anything but the most deep, abiding revulsion at his presence in the White House. It's a bizarre feeling, this visceral contempt for a sitting president. As a lifelong Democrat, I considered Reagan to be nothing more than an old pablum-spouting fool, and came of university age when Nixon was beginning his massive self-destructive melodrama during his second term of office. Seen retrospectively, Nixon now comes across as a paragon of Rousseau-style humanism when compared to our current Frat Boy in Chief. And even Bush père - a veteran Cold Warrior and patrician ex-spook (he was the head of the CIA for a spell) - never threatened to upset the separation of church-and-state equilibrium which remains one of the great enlightened cornerstones of the US constitution.
Then again, as Maureen Dowd points out in Bushworld - her excellent compilation of New York Times columns on the sitting President - much of what motivates 43 (to give him the epithet that Dowd often uses for him) is a need to better 41 (aka the 41st President of the US - his Dad). And for W., this "Oedipus Wrecks" scenario is bound up in rejecting the American aristocratic past that his father represented: "He was going to make sure that when he said 'fixin' and 'bidness', it rang true; that he was a real conservative, not a moderate like his grandfather [the über-patrician Prescott Bush], and not a moderate pretending to be a conservative, like his father. He was going to be a Southern born-again evangelical Christian, not an Episcopalian like his father and grandfather. More than anything, he was going to make sure he was never called a wimp, as his father had been . . ."
If you are not familiar with Maureen Dowd, you should be - as she is the canniest political columnist at work in America today. Since l995, her column on the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times has been essential reading. And what especially makes her a shrewd observer of things presidential and the Washington scene is that, like all memorable political and social commentators, she comes equipped with a first-class bullshit detector. During the Clinton Follies - and especially after his dalliance with La Femme Fatale Lewinsky - Dowd was merciless when it came to the moral gamesmanship he attempted to play . . . a standpoint which led many a conservative American to think: hey, she's one of us.
Au contraire. In the Maureen Dowd encyclopedia of venal political sins, hypocrisy, arrogance and self-righteousness rank very high - which is why she has hit an even sharper, more sardonic stride since W. came to power.
Granted, a collection of columns usually can't be read as rigorous political analysis. Columnists, by and large, shoot from the hip - reacting to quotidian realities under the pressure of a deadline and the need to say something new. As such, compilations of their so-called "oeuvre" often show off all the stylistic and thematic repetitions which are hallmarks of such "spouting-off" work.
Dowd, however, manages to avoid most of these pitfalls. Bushworld is a hefty volume - more than 500 pages - yet what impresses throughout is the precision of her style, the way she never spends words blithely or brings out the kango-hammer to ram home a point. Yes, there are a few columns that fall flat - especially when she tries being a little too clever-clever (an attempt to mimic Las Vegas Rat Pack lingo in detailing the hunt for Bin Laden just doesn't work). But, by and large, she is (to use a proper Vegas-ism) right on the money. She has several ongoing preoccupations - Rummy and Cheney as the Evil Twins of the Bush White House (always, in her dark imagination, sipping good Scotch, plotting world hegemony, and regarding the President as some goof-ball kid); W. as the Bush Family Bad Boy now trying to show up Daddy; and the way the entire administration is in thrall to corporate America and those charming, progressive, outward-thinking Saudis: "Let's declare war on Saudi Arabia!", she declares in one of her best columns. "Let's do regime change in a kingdom that gives medieval a bad name".
Or here's Dowd on Bush's 2002 tour of Europe: "The president's trip has a Henry James tone to it, as the brash American president collides with the world-weary relativism of the Europeans".
And here she is on one major difference between Anglo and American attitudes regarding the Iraqi War: "Brits may be more upset with Mr Blair than Americans are with Mr Bush because they have this quaint idea that even if you think war was a good idea, you should level with the public about your objectives".
As can be gathered, Dowd is a columnist who isn't afraid to show off her considerable erudition (her work is peppered with cultural references and - shock! horror! - big words . . . something rare in these dumbed-down times) or to trade in ideas. As such, she is that rare modern journalist - someone who isn't a blathering fount of second-rate opinions, but a proper worldly commentator, with a deep unnerving clarity about the Manichean world-view of the current powers-that-be.
During my childhood, there was a famous cop programme on American television called Dragnet, featuring a non-actor named Jack Webb who had all the charisma of a paper cup, playing an LA police detective who always commenced his interrogations with the famous line: "Just the facts, ma'am".
Graydon Carter, the Canadian-born editor of Vanity Fair (that very successful, very readable monthly melange of high-brow journalism and showbiz tosh) has written an extended "just the facts, ma'am" jeremiad against the Bush administration. Forget the acidic wit of Maureen Dowd. With a dry, intense serious of purpose, What We've Lost lays out the case against Bush on all possible fronts - from his rightful claim that W. might just be the worst environmental president in history, to the way Bush has undermined the economy and American status in the larger world.
It's hard not to be impressed by Carter's research (and, more tellingly, by his large research team) and the forensic manner in which he piles up evidence against the President. Given that, there is still a "preaching to the converted" feel to the book, just as its over-use of bullet-points lends it an actuarial-report aridity.
Carter has been mocked in certain quarters for publishing such a homily while riding high in the Celebrity Zeitgeist firmament. This strikes me as somewhat disingenuous and irrelevant - especially as the book is both intelligently angry and voices proper concern about the dangerous subtext of the Bush administration.
It's an extended sober sermon - and like all sober sermons, it may be good for you, but as they used to say on Broadway it ain't entertainment.
Douglas Kennedy's new novel, A Special Relationship, is published by Arrow. He is currently finishing his 10th book - State of the Union - to be published by Hutchinson in autumn, 2005
Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk By Maureen Dowd Viking, 523pp. £14.99 What We've Lost By Graydon Carter Little, Brown, 338pp. £12.99