THE MORNING AFTER
American Successes and Excesses 1981-1986
George F. Will
New York: The Free Press, 1986
430 pp., $19.95
"Prosperity doth best discover vice," Francis Bacon declared, "but adversity doth best discover virtue." Few Americans understand this as well as George F. Will. It must be a consoling thought just now, for the critical wolves, running, as always, in a pack, recently made him the subject of the hunt. G.B.Trudeau, creator of the inexplicably popular Doonesbury, depicted him as a poseur, who sends out for his learned quotations. No doubt this was the cartoonist's way of responding to Will's correct observation that "Doonesbury...and other entertainments dabble at wisecracks and call the dabbling 'social commentary.'" But what is one to make of the Washington Post's unflattering profile of its famous columnist? Or of James Fallows' attack in The New York Review of Books? Will, the Atlantic Monthly editor charged, exercises an "unwholesome" influence on other journalists, especially the sagacious Charles Krauthammer.
Certain it is that Krauthammer, a senior editor at The New Republic, opposed that magazine's decision to publish Henry Fairlie's vituperative review of The Morning After, a new collection of Will's columns from Newsweek and the Post. Not able, or wiling, to engage Will in serious debate, the English-born journalist gave it as his opinion that the upstart American had never "fought with temptation or error." After all, Fairlie sneered, Will makes his home in comfortable, "boring" Chevy Chase. And still he has the effrontery to "tell us he is not like other journalists"; he pretends "to a wider and deeper learning than is possessed by his audience [and] by other journalists." To make matters worse, he has made a great financial success - by most estimates Will earns at least $1 million a year. One can almost see Will's critics changing colors as they inform us.
Imagine Fairlie's indignation when, as he claims, Will offered him some enterprising advice: "He said that his column was important to him because it got him on TV. And the Agronsky show was important because it got him on the lecture circuit. He told me that I should be doing the same thing." Clearly, Will's critics find it difficult to contain their resentment and jealousy. But perhaps there is more to it than that.
Perhaps, after all, they are in such high dudgeon because, unlike him, they do not appreciate the finer points of baseball, much less the philosophic significance of Chicago's Cubs. I am not joking, and neither, despite his breezy manner, was Will when, in The Pursuit of Happiness and Other Sobering Thoughts (1978), he explained that Cub fans "know the world is a dark and forbidding place where most new knowledge is false, most improvements are for the worse, the battle is not to the strong, nor riches to men of understanding, and an unscrupulous Providence consigns innocents to suffering." Rooting for "the old, unregenerate Cubs," he testified, "was a complete moral education," something akin to waiting for the South to rise again. Things, you see, have not gone well for the Windy City's North Siders since 1948, the year Will (and I) adopted them. I think it safe to say that our heroes have left no stone unturned in an effort to uncover every possible way to lose a baseball game. In the process, they, and we, have
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