on-writing-well

224 ON WRITING WELL
sion, said, "We're following that whole Hun situation very
closely, and right now it looks encouraging, but I'm hoping we
can get back to you in a few hours with something more definite."
The President appeared concerned but relaxed and definitely
chin-up and in charge.
The piece goes on to describe how rapacious barbarians
swarmed into the city, "burned churches and performing-arts
centers and historic restorations, and dragged away monks, virgins
and associate professors.. . to be sold into slavery" and
seized the savings-and-loan offices, provoking no action by President
Bush, however, because "exit polling at shopping malls
showed that people thought he was handling it O.K."
The President decided not to interfere with the takeover
attempts in the savings-and-loan industry and to pay the hundred
and sixty-six billion dollars, not as a ransom of any type
but as ordinary government support, plain and simple, nothing
irregular about it, and the Huns and the Vandals rode
away, carrying their treasure with them, and the Goths sailed
away up Lake Michigan.
Keillors satire left me full of admiration—first for an act of
humor so original, but also for expressing the citizen outrage I
hadn't found a way to express. All I had been able to muster was
helpless anger that my grandchildren in their old age would still
be paying for Bushs rescue of the industry that the greedy
hordes had plundered.
But there's no law that says humor has to make a point. Pure
nonsense is a joy forever, as Keats didn't quite say. I love to see a
writer flying high, just for the hell of it. The following two
excerpts, from recent pieces by Ian Frazier and John Updike,
are 100 percent off-the-wall; nothing written during Americas