Dog Days Deconstructed

P.J. O’Rourke has an brilliantly scathing review of Ana Marie “Wonkette” Cox’s roman a blog Dog Days. Now, in fairness, I haven’t read the book. To be truthful, given the choice between reading a political potboiler about the sex lives of Washington flacks and being forced to sit in a cage full of rabid, enraged badgers, I’d probably have to go with the latter. As O’Rourke drolly comments:

Washington’s pretensions, blown so large in skins so thin, should produce bursts of hilarity when poked with the dullest of tools, and Dog Days is that. The problem is that fiction, especially comic fiction, concerns why people do what they do. The more unlikely or bizarre the reasons the heart has, the better. Why people do what they do in Washington is so obvious that a beginner novelist would be advised to take up a subject that involves more complex motivations. Breathing, for example.

That’s the problem. There is a certain species of person who loves the thrill of political campaigning – and those people are deeply, deeply disturbed individuals. No doubt fans of Wonkette’s blog will love her book, but the inside baseball of Washington politics is hardly the sort of material that makes a wonderful novel. And while Wonkette’s snark is occasionally amusing, it tires quickly.

On the other hand, maybe Cox does us all a public service:

But in Dog Days‘s favor — and there must be something — Cox has written a stirring polemic for those who think Washington is inherently mindless and greedy and who believe that the dim, envious, self-cherishing mess that is politics should be employed only as society’s last, desperate resort. In this, Dog Days is comparable to Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. Albeit the prose makes Hayek’s seem elegant and pellucid. But Hayek’s first language was German.