Carve Buchwald on Rushmore

A great columnist passes. It’s Art Buchwald, about whom I wrote nearly a year ago, when he’d been in hospice just a few weeks and well before he recovered enough to get thrown out.

Actually he was a part of my master’s thesis of spring 2003, which researched the apparent death of the newspaper humor column.

There was so much to say right when we lost him, Jan. 17. But I kept on reading, and found most everyone said what I was thinking.

Actually, few people said anything close. Suzette Standring did, and one guy at the Post did, and I like what Dave Barry had to say. What was aggravating was the Official Editorial of his Home Paper, The Washington Post.

The Post formally called Buchwald’s satire “a gentle kind of humor.” Nonsense. Buchwald at his best, which he was for many years on most weeks, was an effective satirist. That doesn’t mean he was savage. A humor writer doesn’t call a thief a thief, a crook a crook, a panty puller a panty puller or a war monger a moron and get the sobriquet “gentle.”

Art may have been a friend of the Kennedy family but he pulled no punches on Democrats nor did he hit harder because the target was a Republican.

And not a soul this month has shined a harsh light on Buchwald’s favored method of invented characters and make-believe intereviews — the tactics that have gotten several journalists not only fired but outed very publicly in recent years. Call it fiction, call it the new journalism, or call it Art’s way of ensuring people who don’t read diatribes would read him.

Art, God didn’t break the mold when he made you, but something in the cosmos cracked when you died. Is there room for you on Mount Rushmore? -30-