Fools’ Names, Fools’ Faces
by Andrew Ferguson
Atlantic Monthly. 213 pp. $22.00
Politics and humor have been bedfellows forever. But the pairing of conservatism and humor has struck some—particularly liberals—as faintly oxymoronic. In part, this prejudice must derive from reverse snobbery: conservatives, after all, are defenders of wealth and privilege; surely nothing droll could come of that.
It should be clear by now, however, that contemporary conservatives are defenders first and foremost not of privilege but of the middle class and its values against the elitism of liberal academics, intellectuals, “educationists,” consultants, and other assorted gurus of the “new class.” In addition to a rich body of political analysis and polemics, this brand of conservatism has given birth to a new strain of satirical humor. Notable among those who have successfully found their voices in this genre are P.J. O’Rourke, Christopher Buckley, and the redoubtable grand dame of curmudgeons, Florence King.
The latest to enter this select group is Andrew Ferguson, barely a decade in ink but already admired for his style, wit, and political insight. These traits have been on display since the late 1980’s, first in the American Spectator and now in the Weekly Standard, where Ferguson is a senior editor. Thirty-two of his essays have been collected in Fools’ Names, Fools’ Faces, a compendium of skewerings of pretentious stuffed shirts from politicians to show-business celebrities to media heavies to corporate blowhards.
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In the journalistic pantheon of satirical genius, the obvious touchstone is H.L. Mencken, who cut through pretense with the savage glee of a child eviscerating a piñata. Ferguson’s approach is different. Unlike the self-important Mencken, he has no pretenses himself; to the contrary, he often cultivates the persona of a regular “boob,” offering himself up as a kind of sacrificial Everyman, subject like the rest of us to the intellectual and cultural depredations of the world in which he lives.
The best piece in this mode of self-exposure is on cell phones: more accurately, on the presumption that what we say and do is so important that we dare not risk losing a moment’s contact with Rolodex and world. After a day spent accompanying a corporate VIP on his rigorous daily rounds, Ferguson and his subject finally sit down, late at night, for “phone time”:
The VIP spoke into the phone in hushed tones, hung up, dialed again, resumed speaking in hushed tones. He repeated the pattern for several minutes, while I stared at my phone. He glanced my way only occasionally, with a puzzled look, as though I had taken off my pants. And I did feel naked, in a way. Before this extraordinarily powerful man I sat exposed as a VUP, a very unimportant person, a loser—a guy who, granted the privilege of phone time, couldn’t hack it. Eventually I picked up the phone again and called my office, listening to my voice-mail greeting over and over. “That’s good,” I said at irregular intervals, in hushed tones.
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If the rewards of this playing-down of self are great, so, too, are the rewards of Ferguson’s sometimes uncanny ability to infiltrate alien life forms by entering into his subjects’ ideological fixations and explaining them from the inside. Perhaps his most virtuoso exercise in this line is an essay on “diversity training,” occasioned by a corporate “workshop,” sponsored by the National MultiCultural Institute, which he attended at a swank hotel. Now, why should huge American corporations—centers, after all, of capitalism—invite anti-capitalist ideologues from the rump fringe of the New Left to corrupt their workforce? To Ferguson, the influences that have brought us to this sorry state are old-style Babbittry, New Age psychobabble, and cultural politics, a lethal combination in which business people have been persuaded that they can “goose the bottom line” by gathering together “majority” and “non-majority” types for endless talk, bonding, and “experiential” encounters—or, in other words, exercises in humiliation designed to break down the sense of dignity of the “majority” culture. “In the history of power structures,” Ferguson concludes, “the white-male power structure of late-20th-century America must be the strangest of all: the first to pay people to dismantle itself.”
As this example suggests, behind Ferguson’s funny mask is not only an acute intelligence but a serious political sensibility. In the end, Fools’ Names, Fools’ Faces brings to bear a powerful vision of creeping social sickness; miraculously, it does so with laughter and aplomb, and no small degree of fearlessness.
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