Two Steps Ahead of the Thought Police. - book reviews

First, disclosures. (1) Years ago, the author of these essays was an editor of this magazine. (2) Months ago, he offered to send the journal's editor a fax of a piece he wanted her to see, was told that Commonweal didn't have a fax machine, asked what the cursed things cost, sent a check. (3) Aeons (well, three decades) ago, the author wrote a column for the National Catholic Reporter, then edited by this reviewer; the column was often seasoned with jalapeno and had a lot to do with the paper's early success. (4) Finally, once upon a sunlit day in Sag Harbor, Long Island, New York, this same reviewer, in his role as baserunner in a softball game, rammed his stomach, which was then firm, into the hands of this same author, who was playing third base and had just taken a throw from the outfield. The runner was called out; one of the third baseman's hands got broken. It is not clear to the reviewer that this incident has been forgotten or forgiven. Knowing all this, even after learning that I disagree with from one-to two-sevenths of John Leo's opinions, the canny reader will know better than to expect a hatchet job here, and will rightly expect to get some data no other reviewer will provide.

Such as: John Leo is a natural-born columnist. I know because when he did a column for NCR he usually had to be reminded of the deadline on deadline day. He would say, "Right"; three or four hours later he would dictate the column by phone from New York to Kansas City. It always fitted the allotted space exactly, was reasonable, readable, and witty, needed no editing, and was sometimes devastating, as the late Cardinals Spellman of New York and McIntyre of Los Angeles had reason to know. As for style: Some people think in sentences, some in paragraphs; Leo thinks in 750- to 1,000-word chucks, each one a seamless entity. Besides which, somewhere in his brain there is a figure-of-speech machine that grinds out a steady product line of nicely turned metaphors, similes, and other tropes that divert the reader while conveying the intended message.

The jacket copy for Two Steps doesn't mention Leo's early newspaper experience, his work with Commonweal and NCR, or his stint as editor of the Davenport, Iowa, Catholic Messenger, which was already one of the country's best diocesan papers before he arrived but got more reader-friendly after he took over. From Davenport he moved to New York, first to Commonweal, then - over these many years - to the New York Times, then Time, now U.S. News and World Report. In the early legs of this journey Leo departed from his inborn moderate conservatism; on NCR's opinion page his column, Thinking It Over," usually appeared to the left of "Old and New," written by the paper's house conservative, Garry Wills. Today, insofar as either of them can be labeled, Wills is the more liberal and Leo has gone back to his roots.

Most of the pieces in Two Steps appeared originally in Leo's U.S. News column, "On Society": a bland name for a highly spiced weekly serving, but broad enough to cover its writer's range of interests. One could say that Leo is engaged in the defense of intellectual and linguistic standards, but it would be more Leonine to say that he specializes in skewering inane or fuzzy ideas and inflated, meaning-starved, euphemistic, or otherwise phony rhetoric. That may make him sound curmudgeonly, but no; he does his skewering with cool wit, not foaming-at-the-mouth rage. I suspect that at least some of his targets couldn't get through this book without laughing out loud at least once, even while bleeding.

Most of those targets are apostles or disciples of current intellectual fads and movements: victimology, rights-talk,judicialized politics (e.g., Roe v. Wade), the creation of new exonerative addictions ("Twinkies made me do it"), multiculturalism, deconstructionism, vulgarity as chic, ultra-ultra versions of feminism, agitprop art, the lowering of academic and disciplinary standards by the feel-good school of pedagogy, and the stereotyping and demonization of such former icons as white

This choice of topics would seem to put Leo pretty far toward the conservative end of the ideological spectrum as it's now defined. In fact he is no ally of Pat Robertson, Pat Buchanan, or Newt Gingrich (who is among those neatly skewered here), and Leo does not live in the same moral universe as Rush Limbaugh. By more enduring standards, Leo is a commonsensical centrist. Sounds boring, isn't; yet on occasion his output can raise the hackles of a somewhat-knee-jerk-type liberal such as this former baserunner.

My minor complaint is that Leo sometimes gets a little mean. Yes, gay propagandists use gay-bashing to earn the sympathy due to victims; but gay-bashing happens. Yes, the addiction defense/apologia for cruel and criminal behavior is being overused; that won't be cured by calling certain addicts "drunks" or "junkies."

Major complaint: Focus. In the course of one essay attacking the substitution of "self-esteem" gimmicks for discipline and genuine teaching in ghetto schools, Leo mentions, more or less in an aside, that the teachers in these schools "are expected to cope with the devastating results of poverty, racial discrimination, crime, drugs, broken homes, and child abuse." What fascinates me about that listing is that the economic and political causes of these evils - and, more importantly, what to do about them - don't get much attention elsewhere in the book, even though, in my view, they are far more threatening to our future as a society than, say, the jejune deconstructionist babblings Leo recorded at a meeting of the Modern Language Association. Leo may be right in blaming the country's failure to resolve issues of massive inequality on a "dead-end" liberal politics that relies exclusively on appeals to white guilt. He is certainly right to call for the building of "broad, nonpolarizing, multiracial alliances." But how to go about it? Who should join? What is to be done? If that's inappropriate (Leo is a counter-puncher, not an agenda-maker), then how about more nonstuffy, nonpreachy essays on the enemies of distributive justice? He can do it; one piece in the book exposes the knowing collusion of the makers of costly gym shoes in the drug trade through their intensive marketing in thee ghettos. Verdict: Leo ends the final essay in the book, a review of a series of social studies textbooks, with this judgment: "There are things in the books I disliked and would toss if I could. But the series is a winner, a better and fairer text about America and the world than anyone [else] has yet produced, and I hope it does well." There's not much I would toss out of Two Steps, there's some I'd like to see added, but it's a sharper, and certainly funnier, work of social commentary than any others you're likely to see. Go read.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Commonweal Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group