The Quiet Subversive

"The world is too much with us," wrote William Wordsworth in a famous sonnet, and Russell Baker echoes the poet three times a week in the New York Times. A funny place to do it, in a paper full of world news. But to Humorist Baker, 42, even a fraction of all the news that's fit to print is far too much. "The law of life," he writes, "is that there is almost always less happening than meets the eye."

What met his eye last week was not a paucity of happenings but 1967's "ten grossest excesses." It was a brilliant, unpartisan, vindictive selection. Charles de Gaulle was there, of course, along with Mao and his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The 1967 football season, hanging on "like a summer cold," qualified. So did Jacqueline Kennedy magazine covers and the movie Casino Royale, "the utter boring vacuity of the put-on carried to excess." Among gross literary excesses there was, happily, Marshall McLuhan's "losing battle with the English language," and The Story of O, "unarguably the dullest dirty book ever written."* Finally, there were all the "Ins" (the bein, the kissin, the wedin, the dance-in, the shop-in, the drinkin, the love-in, the sing-in), and--with unerring glee--the moaning over the Generation Gap.

Strike for Sanity. Playing the role of a quiet subversive among the hortatory voices of the Times editorial page, Baker mocks "overstates," the "crisis-glut" and determined problem solvers. "A solved problem creates two new problems," he writes, "and the best prescription for happy living is not to solve any more problems than you have to." A sober Washington reporter himself until a sense of futility overcame him, Virginia-born Baker became the Times's first humor columnist six years ago. He uses humor, he says, "to strike a blow for sanity."

Baker is stationed in Washington, but his mind wanders far beyond. After last summer's riots, he drove straight to the heart of the plot: Rap Brown was actually on the payroll of the Senate Appropriations Committee. Brown's job: to find "inexpensive solutions to the nation's racial problems." When trouble threatens, Rap is rushed to the spot to deliver inflammatory harangues. Then the Senate can blame the riots on "outside agitators" and avoid spending any money on the slums. A year ago, wrote Baker, a theater script had been rejected as too far-out because it had Khrushchev's nephew defecting to the U.S. and joining the John Birch Society. But life outdid art. "Stalin's daughter defected to the U.S. and joined Sam Levenson and Elia Kazan in the society of bestsellers."

Guilt Ghetto. Then there was one fictitious Charles Darnay, "who had been born, bred and marinated in his white liberalism." Darnay was aghast when his son Sidney returned from the New Left conference in Chicago in a decidedly illiberal frame of mind after being denounced by Black Power advocates. " 'I'm sick of being called a genocidal maniac!' young Sidney shouted. 'Sh-sh,' cautioned his mother. 'The liberals next door may hear you, and then we won't get invited to any more cocktail parties.' 'I'm sick of living in this liberal ghetto,' young Sidney said. 'Why don't we move out of here into a nice reactionary neighborhood where people can hate other people instead of themselves?' Old Charles Darnay groaned. You could tell he was dying inside like a man who was seeing everything he had ever stood for turning to ashes. 'Can't you give your father a little peace in his final hours?' asked Mrs. Darnay. 'Put your arm around him and tell him you'll carry on the burden of guilt when he puts it down.' "

Baker's wit only partially conceals an earnest preoccupation with the sad state of the U.S. as he sees it. Too much is synthetic and contrived, he insists, from the current sterile search for the "real self" to the bloodless, painless violence that saturates TV. Everything is produced to be consumed and discarded, and he puts his column in the same category. "There is something sneaky about us," he writes, proving once again that the best humorists are often arch-pessimists. "It is almost as if we were determined to come and go without leaving a footprint. It is fitting that this should be the generation for which total annihilation is at least feasible."

*A far cry from Times Book Critic Eliot Fremont-Smith, who found O touched with "tragic grandeur" and employing "erotic materials" to stimulate the reader to a "total, authentic literary experience."

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