Art Buchwald - 18 September 1971

If Jonathan Swift were alive today his proposal for the universal use of Irish manufacturers, in which he proposed that Ireland should boycott all English goods, well I suppose it would make him rather less popular in England than, say, Mr Cahill now, or that famous ogre of the 1920s the mention of whose name used to frighten little children, the man who turned, down the years, into the benign Eamon de Valera.

Swift published his piece anonymously and though a prosecution against him was started, nothing came of it. A few years later, Swift injected his bitter satirical talent with more acid still. There was a big to-do at the time – all this was something over 200 years ago – about the disproportionate number of children among the poor.

Parliament had a debate about it, to try and solve this embarrassment, the gist of which was that the poor really oughtn’t to have so many children because it added to their general misery, and it took away from their particular usefulness as 16-hour-a-day wage-slaves. Swift contributed a damning suggestion in a famous pamphlet which was called, A Modest Proposal for Preventing Children of Poor People from being a Burden to their Parents and to the Country. His modest proposal was simply that they should be fattened and eaten.

Now 200 years ago, satirists of this quality ran a constant risk of imprisonment on no other grounds that they had offended the government in power. Today, in spite of a general howl on both sides of the Atlantic about the rush to curtail our liberties, we certainly, it seems to me, have more freedom to spout any opinions at all, even to spout the need to kill your parents, if you consider them to be bourgois fascists. More freedom, I should say, than any two self-governing peoples have ever had in history.

Art Buchwald – a name I hope is known to you – has been called the modern Dean Swift by no less than intellect by Mr Dean Acheson, the former secretary of state to President Truman, and who even in his later 70s continues to look like a Spanish grandee in the full prime of his powers. Mr Acheson does not exaggerate. Art Buchwald is a small, chunky roly-poly man, of swathy complexion, black hair and eyes, glasses like goggles, and a sort of cocky rolling gate, like a sailor just come ashore and up to no good.

Mr Buchwald came to our attention in the years after the war when his paper sent him to Paris and he wrote a column whose line was that of a latter-day Mark Twain, an American innocent abroad. But like Mark Twain, Buchwald was very far from an innocent, but he had hit on a humorous device of pretended innocence and bewilderment. Which, at one and the same time, satirised both the Americans in Europe and the Europeans themselves.

This has been a fairly constant vein of American humour. I remember Mark Twain, for instance, saying that the English were quite right not to have a laundry delivery service because your shirt was so starched that it walked back into your hotel room unaided. And there was Will Rogers, the old cowboy innocent, he was another.

At the height of his fame, which was, I suppose in the 1920s, he was invited by the then Prince of Wales, the present Duke of Windsor, to go to Lords and watch a cricket match. Rogers saw the players eat a large and nourishing breakfast, and then get down to business about ten thirty in the morning. He was just beginning to pick up the elements of the game, when the players walked off the field, and he wondered what had happened and he was told it was the lunch interval.

To an American a game is a furious contest, if not a bloody battle,and the sight of an American football or baseball team going off the field for refreshment – well it would not be more surprising than the men in the Normandy invasion pausing on the French coast to have a hotdog and a Coke. However, Will Rogers settled down again into his cricket lesson at about 2.15, and then at 4.15 he was astonished to see the players walk off again. It was, of course, the tea interval. When the day was over the Prince of Wales asked him what he thought about the game. He replied, "Your Highness, I think it’s just fine but if I were in charge, I’d line ‘em all up before the game began and say, now listen fellas, no food till you’re through."

Well, Art Buchwald for many years had uproarious fun with the French, and with himself as a supposedly, and permanently, bewildered American abroad. Then his paper switched his assignment to Washington. Now everybody with any experience of daily journalism knew at once that it was a mistake. It maybe all right for powerful authors like Ernest Hemingway to say "Find out what you can do, and then do something else" but most first-rate journalists do one thing very well, and I think should devote themselves, till their brain gives out, trying to do it supremely well.

You know what happened, Buchwald took a month or two to get the feel of Washington and the complexities of the political system, and then he was better than ever. He has the acutest sense of irony and a gift for quite simple comic ideas which he then writes straight, without any verbal decorations and adjectival folderols – the very opposite of highbrow wit.

It was Buchwald who first suggested, oh, three, four years ago, that the way to end the Vietnam war was simply to declare that the United States had won, proclaim a victory celebration and bring the boys home to the blare of happy bands.

I don’t know how long it was after the second war – 10, possibly a dozen years, I should guess – that he wrote a column containing his own modest proposal to bail Britain out of her recurring money crises, and to save the United States the periodic embarrassment of having to put up the cash.

What we should both do, he said, was to contrive as soon as possible World War Three and arrange to lose it. That way, supposing we were fighting the Russians, they would then put up the money to reconstruct our entire industrial plant, which they destroyed, along the most modern lines, and they would advance the loans or the outright gifts and send us productivity teams to teach us how to out-produce them. In a few years, the British and the Americans would be the most prosperous nations on earth, while the winners would be struggling with a rouble problem.

Well this jest has turned out to be too true to be good. Mr Nixon’s 10% surcharge on imports has dealt a blow to the Japanese, which is at once an open embarrassment, and, a secret relief to American businessmen. We have all wakened up too late to the fact that the Japanese were not merely constructing a coprosperity sphere in Asia, but a Japanese prosperity sphere of the entire globe.

In the guileless years a decade or so ago, we all found ourselves buying small, beautifully-designed little radios of Japanese manufacture and then television sets, and saying to ourselves, in a still comfortably condescending way, smart cookies, those Japanese.

Today, there are full blooded American patriots who could go through their kitchen and their living room and their garage and find that most of the products they need and use are either Japanese imports or are assembled in the United States from Japanese blueprints.

Ten years ago I went down to West Virginia to watch the making of a movie about John Brown the liberationist who armed Negro slaves, was captured at Harpers Ferry and executed. He is the same John Brown who’s soul, they say, "Goes marching on". Harpers Ferry is now a compulsory tourist stop, and attached to the inn is a souvenir shop. I remember picking up a tiny gun and a Confederate hat, looking at them casually and seeing printed on them what is, by the way, printed on the decorative ashtrays used on all American aircraft carriers, "Made in Japan".

So, even then, the Japanese had taken out a patent on American history both ancient and modern. Well, we were astounded to hear three weeks ago that the United States takes over 30% of all Japan’s huge manufacturing industry. Nobody needs to be told also that Germany is the second most prosperous nation.

No wonder I got the answer I did at a lecture before a California university audience a year or two ago when I asked the assembled students which were our most dependable allies in the second war – something that was over about five years before they were born. In a flash, a bright boy stood up and said, "Germany and Japan".

And he wasn’t being funny, it was an honest slip, but as profound as all such spontaneous slips are.

Well now, Mr Buchwald has written another column about the recent visit to China of one of the most distinguished, possibly the most influential, of American journalists, Mr James Reston of the New York Times. Mr Reston had no sooner arrived in Peking – this is the fact, not Buchwald’s invention – than he was seized with appendicitis and he was whipped off to hospital and had it out. The name of the hospital is the Anti-Imperialist Hospital. It does not require any cynicism at all to guess that Mr Reston was treated as tenderly as Chairman Mao himself would be if he fell into the hands of his own medical butchers.

Mr Reston wrote several ecstatic pieces about the technical skill, the meticulousness in care and the kindness and the general charm and dedication of the hospital staff, for which we should all be grateful. He was restored to the outer world in fine shape and such high good humour that his enthusiasm for Chinese medicine extended, over several weeks, to the people and the system.

It’s not unkind, I think, to suggest that Mr Reston was given the full in-tourist treatment. His pieces bought balm to the souls of American liberals, who begin to believe that the Chinese are, after all, probably just American puritans three centuries later. It also bought great ire to the souls of the Republicans and conservatives.

Mr Buchwald, as usual, knew precisely what had happened to Mr Reston and gave us cause to forgive him. The Chinese surgeons, Mr Buchwald said, had inserted in Mr Reston’s stomach a tiny tape machine which, whenever Mr Reston was inclined to make nasty bourgeois comments on Communist China, would cause him involuntary to recite the thoughts of Chairman Mao.

This explanation has released a gale of happy laughter in Mr Reston’s critics, dissolved their bile, absolved Mr Reston of all charges of fellow travelling, and made us grateful, yet again, for the healing wit of Art Buchwald.

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