Says the town crier of ‘Bushworld’: All is not well

Bushworld

Enter at Your Own Risk

Maureen Dowd

Putnam: 524 pp., $25.95

*

Yikes, what a job -- working in the crosshairs of D.C.’s big guns. The constant scrutiny, the nasty comments, the furious accusations.

Who, Dubya? I don’t mean the president -- although the occupant of that job has also been known to give and take hits now and then, some of the latter from the person I am talking about: Maureen Dowd, political columnist for the op-ed pages of the New York Times.

Within certain ZIP codes of the bookend coasts, Dowd’s name must be about as familiar as those of people she microtomes in print -- Cheney and “Rummy” and others in her cast of characters. For almost 10 years, her twice-weekly column has been “appointment journalism” for readers who expect to roar with laughter or with rage, depending on whose Gore is getting oxed. (I don’t know whether she’s used that particular word-toggle or not, but it’s the kind of Dowdian trompe of language she’s fond of.)

“Bushworld” is the name of her collected columns, and the title column is an example of Dowd at her more restrained and most effective. “It’s their reality. We just live and die in it,” she begins. “In Bushworld, our troops go to war and get killed, but you never see the bodies coming home” -- and so on, a list of trenchant contrasts of conservative policies versus practices. The facts are already out there, but her juxtapositions, and the starkness of language, persuade with quiet authority. In her best work, Dowd makes her points, not her prose, the star of her work.

A column is a means of leveraging reportage into a judgment, furthering some understanding by connecting factual dots into a pattern in a way that a news reporter cannot -- or, in this timid day and age, isn’t allowed to do. Metaphor, simile, parable -- all hang from the columnist’s tool belt.

You can disagree with Dowd’s conclusions -- and many do: Nasty nicknames like “Moron Dud” have surfaced on the Web. Conservatives waved “Ellipsis-Gate” around like the bride’s bloody sheet as proof that Dowd, that pinko, was up to no good. This was last year, after she shortened a Bush quote in her column, changing some of the emphasis of the remarks without using an ellipsis to signal that she had done so.

Dowd is not one to shrink from name-calling. Does she, you wonder, write on a computer, or a Ronco Slicer and Dicer? She spanked the Clintons so regularly that they must have thought that for every White House action there was an equal and opposite Dowd reaction. Al Gore, she wrote, is “so feminized ... he’s practically lactating.” But she has more seriously railed against the perils of “Bushworld,” sounding the tocsin in columns both substantive and disturbing about the toxic policies of the “Kennebunkport Corleones,” a family bent on “ambition, partisanship, political debts and revenge.” The Bushes “are always gracious, until they need to go ugly.”

Good Dowd can balance substance and sizzle and still be acidulous and funny, drawing righteous blood with tongue still stuck in cheek like a Tootsie Roll Pop. (To the bloggers who think writing this stuff is as easy as passing gas, it’s actually very hard to pull off. You can’t frost the cake until you’ve baked it; you can’t write a solid column about the news until you’ve covered it, from zoning board hearings to obituaries to murder trials.)

Good Dowd allows herself to get truly indignant about some wrongdoing. Bad Dowd is just popping political bubble-wrap to see how loud a noise it will make -- and who will turn around to look.

In her fondness for snappy Madison Avenue glibness, Dowd can strive so hard for a punch line that she can lose her way, and her point, in such prose echolalia as “The world’s in a swirl,” and “The president can’t skirt the issues by hiding behind Laura’s skirts forever.”

Her gig may be the most coveted journalistic real estate in the world. (For the record, the only frisson of envy I had was reading in her book’s acknowledgments her thanks to her assistant. She has an assistant?! I have to make six calls to find out who can replace the fluorescent bulb in my desk lamp!)

But she covers the claustrophobic N.Y.-D.C. power circuit, which is like being stuck on a model train: the same tedious route over and over, the same changeless scenery, the same incestuous figurines simply changing uniforms. Dowd has earned her own place on that landscape: Bush I wrote about her into a little “comic screed” as Lady Maureen, the “charming princess” of the Times’ op-ed world. Bush II’s nickname for her, she hears, is “The Cobra,” of which she writes the groaner, “I was a major-league asp.”

Dowd’s most frequent critics say she trivializes her topics. Well, it’s been a trivial age. What could be called the Dowd Decade, of her reporting and columnizing, stretches from November 1989 to September 2001. In 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down, the United States tore down the goalposts. End of game, end of history, we won. We spent the next dozen years in a self-absorbed frat party of telecommuting and SUVs, scented candles and tech stocks. We were so fat and happy that Congress could blow off reforming health care to spend time and treasure impeaching a man for lying about sex. Dowd took “the personal is political” to its furthest end; the political became stained blue dresses and pork rinds. She draped her columns on the coat-hanger of pop culture, movies and TV. Some worked, some were just overworked.

Then came Sept. 11. The world didn’t get serious -- it already was -- but we got serious about the world. A different time calls for a different tone. Dowd, like the rest of us, is still adjusting.