Capital Crimes

It’s taken 12 years for Christopher Buckley’s winning “Thank You for Smoking” to make it to the big screen. In the genre of Washington, D.C., political satire, Mr. Buckley is the current reigning champion. It’s a difficult genre because it is so easy to detect when a satirist is cheating – pulling punches or protecting favored ideas or institutions. And while new additions to the genre, like Ana Marie Cox’s recent “Dog Days,” languish at the bottom of the book-selling list, Mr. Buckley has made a career of producing successful political satire. Any top five list of the genre is sure to list more than one entry of his. Here’s mine:1 Thank You for Smoking,’ Christopher Buckley This scathing look at lobbying in our nation’s capital, where registered lobbyists outnumber congressmen, senators, and their combined staffs, improbably succeeds in making the MOD Squad – tobacco, gun, and alcohol lobbyists – the most likable characters. Nick Naylor, the chief tobacco lobbyist, emerges as the book’s dark hero in his battle against the neo-Puritan legislators and the nanny state they are creating in the name of health and safety.2 ‘Every Man a King,’ Bill Kauffman A young man from upstate New York gets himself hired onto the staff of a boozy senator from his home state and soon finds himself caught up in the world of conservative think tanks, television shoutshows, political hypocrisy, and identity politics. When his career in our capital comes to a crashing halt and John Huey Ketchum returns home, he sees he has reached a kind of salvation, a triumph of hometown values over the corrupt and corrupting values of D.C.3 ‘Lucky Bastard,’ Charles McCarry This former CIA agent crafted a darkly satiric tale of Jack Adams, a charming liar and compulsive womanizer with a mastery of politics. This is the Clinton years through the eyes of a paranoid conspiracy theorist with a viciously sharp sense of humor.4 ‘Little Green Men,’ Christopher Buckley In this political satire for the “X-Files” generation, a prominent political pundit is kidnapped by a disgruntled FBI agent but is convinced that he has been the victim of an alien abduction. This theory leads the capital establishment to shun him, but John O. Banion becomes the head of a mass movement of UFO cultists who stage a “Millennium Man” march on Washington, D.C.5 ‘The Fall of the Republic and Other Political Satires,’ Ambrose Bierce. Without Ambrose Bierce, we might never have had H.L. Mencken, P.J. O’Rourke, or Christopher Buckley. He was America’s original political satirist, and is arguably still unsurpassed in his disdain for what passes for self-government in our republic. Far from advocating a crusade for democracy, Bierce opens his book with a description of the American form of government as “a system discredited by an unbroken record of failure in all parts of the world.”

Capital Crimes

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