Wry Martinis (15 page)

For the body of your review, Dr. Johnson said it best:

‘A fly, sir, may sting a stately horse and make him wince, but one is but an insect, and the other a horse still.’

Regards, Tom Clancy.”

“I don’t know how he got the fax number,” says Buckley. “He must have gotten it from the CIA.” He faxed back:

“D
EAR
T
OM,

I may be the insect, but you’re still the horse’s arse.

Regards, Christopher Buckley.”

Clancy again:

“Sonny, when your paperback sales begin to approach my hardcover sales in, say, England, do let me know.

Until then, at least learn how to do a professional review.

Your dad knows how. Ask him.

TC.”

But the younger Buckley had needed no help from daddy in crafting a withering notice.

“I’ve always loved Chris’s writing,” says
Book Review
Editor Rich Nicholls. “And he approached this assignment with
such zest.
”

The review opens by quoting Mark Twain, who once said of one of Henry James’s books, “Once you put it down you can’t pick it up.”

Buckley, whose most recent novel,
Thank You for Smoking
, was well reviewed but not mega-selling, calls Clancy’s eighth novel, at 766 pages, “a herniating experience.” What’s more, its anti-Japanese theme is “racist” and “as subtle as a World War II anti-Japanese poster showing a mustachioed Tojo bayoneting Caucasian babies.”

Referring to Clancy as a “fire-breathing right winger,” he describes the prose style as “superseding macho that permeates each page like
dried sweat. [Hero Jack] Ryan’s Secret Service code name is, I kid you not, ‘Swordsman.’ ” And although Clancy took great pains to include more female characters, “his feminism is pretty smarmy,” observes Buckley, “like a big guy getting a woman in a choke hold and giving her a knuckly noogie on top of her head by way of showing her she’s ‘O.K.’ ”

Of course,
Debt of Honor
is No. 1 on
The New York Times
best-seller list and, like all of Clancy’s books, is likely to stay there awhile with or without Buckley’s review.

Perhaps that’s why Clancy was playing meek yesterday when he said in a telephone interview that his faxes were meant as a joke. “I’m sorry he didn’t take it that way. I goofed. I’m sorry.”

Sadly then, this skirmish seemed destined not to rise to the mythical level of, say, Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy, Stephen Spender and David Leavett or even Kitty Kelley and Barbara Howar. But it at least has the novelty of being fought with a modern communications tool. “This must be the first feud to be fought over faxes,” says Nicholls.

But there was hope. As Buckley was preparing to make a train to New York yesterday, the familiar high-pitched whine of an incoming fax could be heard over the telephone.

“Must dash,” Buckley laughed, in best faux hauteur voice. “More hate coming!”

—
The Washington Post
, 1994;
reprinted with permission of the
author and the Washington Writers
Group

Spin Cycle

A couple of years ago, while wondering with some desperation what to write about, I turned on the TV and there was a nice-looking talking-head lady from the Tobacco Institute, manfully (as it were) denying that there was any scientific link between smoking and cancer, heart disease, respiratory disease, or athlete’s foot. She was attractive, well-spoken, intelligent, and as persuasive as she could be, given the deplorably disingenuous data she was pitching. I thought:
What an interesting job that must be. Get up in the morning, brush your teeth, and go and sell death for a living.

A few days later I was reading in the paper about some teenage kid who, to judge from his blood alcohol content, had drunk two kegs of beer single-handedly, then got in his pickup truck and careened over the yellow line into a minivan, annihilating an entire Boy Scout troop. And there at the bottom of the story was a quote from a spokesman for the beer-keg industry saying what an awful tragedy it was, but that no one was more concerned about teenage drunk driving than the beer-keg industry. I thought:
Boy, I bet that guy trembles every time his beeper goes off.

A few days after that, a “disgruntled postal worker” went bonkers and blew away his supervisor and a half dozen others with a gun with a name like Hamburger-Maker .44 Triple-Magnum. And sure enough, the National Rifle Association was right on the case, worrying out loud that if we start outlawing Hamburger-Maker .44s, how long before we outlaw the Swiss Army knife? I thought:
There’s another interesting job.

The idea formed of writing a major, thick, serious, nonfiction study of institutional hypocrisy in America. It would be grandiose and groundbreaking, but with an
accessible
title:
I’m Shocked—Shocked!
(said, of course, by Captain Renaud in
Casablanca
, on being handed his gambling
winnings moments after closing down Rick’s Café for gambling). The book—no, the
volume
—would cover government, business, society. It would be comprehensive, exhaustive, thorough. And boring.

But I kept coming back to these three yuppie Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Another title came to me:
Thank You for Smoking.
And then the mortgage bill arrived, so that settled it.

I wrote to the Tobacco Institute, the various liquor lobbies, and to the National Rifle Association. These were artfully worded letters announcing that I had had enough of the neo-Puritanism that was sweeping America and was embarking on a book about it. True enough. They may now complain that they were deceived, but if they look at those letters, they’ll see that they really weren’t—and anyway, people who make their living pushing cigarettes, liquor, and guns ought not to claim the high moral ground. And they shouldn’t look a gift novel in the mouth: The trio of characters who make up the book’s Mod Squad—it’s an acronym for “Merchants of Death”—are sort of likable. Or at least sympathetic.

Likable? Yuppie mass murderers? Or mass enablers?
Sympathetic?

I went to see the attractive lady from the Tobacco Institute. She was very nice and … tall. I don’t want to get into amateur psychology here, but my guess is that it’s not all that easy being a six-foot-one-inch-tall woman, especially as she had no doubt reached this height in her teens; and maybe, just possibly, there’s some anger inside that she’s still, uh, working out. (But it wasn’t my business, and I didn’t ask.) I was surprised, however, to learn that her previous job had been at the Department of Health and Human Services. “At my going-away party, they were going to give me signed copies of the Surgeon General’s report,” she said, smiling, “but thought better of it.”

I wanted to know what it’s like, being a merchant of death. I didn’t use that exact phrase. Well, she said, it’s not easy. No, I said, I imagine it’s not. You get threats, she said. What do you do about them?, I said. You throw ’em away, she said.

Once she was at a health symposium—that’s part of her job, attending
health
symposiums; what a warm welcome she must get—standing next to Everett Koop, the formidable former Surgeon General who looks like
Captain Ahab. And someone mentioned that she used to work at HHS. And he said, “I wish she’d gone to be a prostitute on Fourteenth Street instead.” Don’t think that didn’t hurt.

I said, How do you introduce yourself to strangers? “Well,” she said, “you never come straight out and say, ‘I work for the Tobacco Institute.’ ” First she’ll say, “I work in public relations.” If they press, she’ll say, “I work for a trade association.” If they still press, she says a trade association “for a major manufacturer.” She added, “You never know if this guy’s mother has just died of cancer.” By now I’m shaking my head in sympathy, thinking:
Gosh, it must be just awful.

But why, I fumbled diffidently, what’s—

“A nice girl like me doing in a place like this?” she finished my sentence.

“Yes!” I cry. “Why?”

She exhales her smoke—like Lauren Bacall. “I’m paying the mortgage.”

Of course: the Yuppie Nuremberg defense:
I vas only paying ze mortgage!
I admire this woman. In the kingdom of the morally blind, she has the echolocation of a bat. On the way out, she points to a booklet on her credenza. Next to it is a packet of “Death” brand cigarettes, an actual brand of cigarettes, no name on the front of the pack, just a white-on-black skull. As tchotchkes, the Tobacco Institute could do no better than a pack of Death cigarettes.

But the booklet. It says, “Helping Youth to Say No to Tobacco.” She says, “That’s what I’m proudest of.”

This
was
an impressive statement. My admiration for her faculties of cognitive dissonance, already large, swelled to even greater proportions. Goebbels might as well have produced a booklet entitled “The Führer and the Jews—A Love Story.”

Oh dear. I promised that I wouldn’t moralize. It’s not my job as a novelist. It’s just that I have kids myself and … well, no, back to the story.

Much in the news at the time was the controversy about Old Joe, Camel cigarettes’ famous dromedary with the nose that seems to remind some people of a penis. Camel started a new campaign with Old Joe at its center, wearing sunglasses and playing the saxophone, shooting pool, coolly eyeing the chicks. RJR Nabisco was putting out about seventy-five million dollars’ worth of Old Joe ads a year. The cigarette companies
say that they are not—repeat,
not
—trying to get new business. They say they seek only to reinforce brand loyalty—and brand disloyalty, trying to get a
teeny, tiny
percentage of smokers to switch brands.

In the wake of the Old Joe campaign, Camel’s share of the illegal children’s cigarette market climbed from .5 percent to 32 percent. Outraged mothers howled. Even
Advertising Age
, Mammon’s own trade journal, editorialized against the Old Joe campaign, to little avail. Old Joe is still among us, playing his saxophone.

Meanwhile, overseas, the U.S. trade representative had begun to bully Pacific Rim countries—Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and others—into opening their markets to U.S. tobacco. Up till then, those countries hadn’t allowed cigarette advertising. Then comes the U.S. trade rep threatening something called a 301 action, named for a section in the 1974 Trade Act that allows the president to slap retaliatory tariffs on foreign products if their country of origin is seen to be discriminating against Marlboro et al. by not allowing Marlboro et al. to advertise—never mind that
no
cigarette advertising has been allowed.

Inevitably, the countries buckled to U.S. government pressure. The happy result? In just the first year that South Korea allowed U.S. tobacco advertising, the smoking rate for male teenagers rose from 18 percent to 30 percent. For female teenagers, it rose from 2 percent to 9. The trends were similar in the other countries. The World Health Organization estimates that between now and the end of the century, smoking will kill 250 million people in the industrialized world. That’s one in five, roughly the population of the United States.