From the Shelves of the Paco Library

The polemical essay has a long and honored tradition in America, and although there have always been practitioners of the art whose vituperative impulses have far exceeded their intelligence and skill, our country has produced a not insignificant number of first-rate social coroners, detectives and judges, possessed of superior logical faculties, wide-ranging education and that enviable skill with the seltzer bottle that has left so many frauds, imbeciles and imposters soaked and spluttering in impotent rage.

A masterly artisan of the craft is Mr. R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., founder of the American Spectator. Stylistically, he is in the line of descent of H.L. Mencken, weaving irony, sarcasm, gaudy metaphors and a jeweler’s eye for the absurd detail into devastating character sketches that enlighten as well as entertain. In Public Nuisances (Basic Books, 1979), Tyrrell applies the lance to a host of boils on the body politic, leaving us not only wiser, but healthier by virtue of the cardio-pulmonary benefits of prolonged laughter. True, several of the notables at which Tyrrell takes aim in this book are largely forgotten today: Charles Reich, Joseph Califano. But the book is worth the price of admission if only for the two chapters on Jimmy Carter (“Jimmy the Wonderboy” and “Jimmy: Midway in the Revels”), and the riches are piled high with exquisite pieces on Lillian Hellman, Gore Vidal, Ralph Nader and Ted Kennedy.

Here are several samples featuring the hapless Carter:

“In 1974 Jimmy kissed his mother on the cheek and struck out for the 1976 Democratic nomination. His luck remained golden, for in 1976 – as in 1972 – all the major Democratic contenders had again forgotten to study the abstruse nominating procedures of their party [Sound familiar? – Paco]. Jimmy had studied them for months, and halfway through the primaries he was being touted as a political genius. Truth to tell, he harvests very few pearls from his noodle, and he made a pathetic spectacle of himself on numerous occasions; but his competitors were unhorsed by their own party’s reform mania, and Jimmy – unblack, unyoung, and unfeminine – was sole beneficiary.”
* * *

“If ever one needed evidence that mere power is the moderns’ only serious value, their endorsement of the Wonderboy provides evidence in profusion. Power to gratify a ravenous and ridiculous ego is the moderns’ most holy sacrament, indeed their only one. So they held their noses and spouted for Jimmy. A mere two years after Nixon the Democrats actually nominated a Nixon of their own. Jimmy is a ruthless, relentless pursuer of power; and that is the whole of him. Agreed, it is revolting to listen to that limp, desiccated rhetoric and to witness his bald position-taking, but it was amusing to observe such moderns as Norman Mailer as they fabricated from mere nothingness an ‘interesting’, ‘decent’, ‘pleasant’ man, a Protestant JFK. And it was even more amusing to see the moderns desert him in hysteria when it became apparent that he was the most ill-equipped man to inhabit the White House in this century.”
* * *

“The saga began on January 20, 1977, the date on which Jimmy was inaugurated 39th President. His inaugural address, intoned in his famous andante con ping pong cadence, was an arrestingly straightforward and simple-witted oration that should have answered immediately and forever his campaign’s famed rhetorical question” ‘Why Not the Best?’. Why not indeed!”
* * *

“From Poland the boys went to Tehran, where Jimmy attended the Shah’s New Year’s party, took aboard two glasses of wine, and turned weepy. In India he astonished government officials by growing dyspeptic when they temporarily resisted taking him and his photographers to an impoverished village. During a state dinner, he, and only he, was harassed by a common housefly, thus necessitating the professional services of Prime Minister Desai’s official Hindu fly swattist. And during the meal he whispered contemptuous remarks about Desai while facing a mysterious electronic device that, upon further inspection, turned out to be a microphone. Alas, the infernal contraption was full of juice, and the Wonderboy’s discourtesies were broadcast all over the dining room.”

Unfortunately, I believe the book is now out of print; but a little poking around in used bookstores might reward your search – well worth the effort.