{"id":258,"date":"2007-01-21T11:11:03","date_gmt":"2007-01-21T17:11:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/index.php\/2007\/01\/21\/carve-buchwald-on-rushmore\/"},"modified":"2009-07-07T21:56:27","modified_gmt":"2009-07-08T02:56:27","slug":"carve-buchwald-on-rushmore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2007\/01\/carve-buchwald-on-rushmore\/","title":{"rendered":"Carve Buchwald on Rushmore"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

Actually he was a part of my master’s thesis of spring 2003, which researched the apparent death of the newspaper humor column.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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

The Post<\/em> 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.”<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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-<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[29],"class_list":["post-258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-spin","tag-columnist"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":168,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2006\/03\/the-irreplaceable-art-buchwald\/","url_meta":{"origin":258,"position":0},"title":"The Irreplaceable Art Buchwald","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"March 15, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Copyright 2006 Ben S. Pollock Now, there's any number of articles about one of my heroes, Art Buchwald. Here is one, written by a friend, just a couple of weeks ago. Mr. Buchwald is dying, by choice. He's well past 80, and his body is shutting down, he knows it\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The Course of Words"","block_context":{"text":"The Course of Words","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/course-of-words\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":306,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2007\/04\/national-columnists-day\/","url_meta":{"origin":258,"position":1},"title":"National Columnists’ Day","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"April 18, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"On April 18, 1945, a Japanese sniper took out Ernie Pyle during a Pacific Island skirmish. Pyle was a beloved newspaperman, whose columns were anticipated by millions of readers of hundreds of newspapers. You couldn't say that about a lot of journalists then, much less now. Most war reporting was\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The Course of Words"","block_context":{"text":"The Course of Words","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/course-of-words\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":366,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2007\/10\/alas-richard\/","url_meta":{"origin":258,"position":2},"title":"Alas, Richard","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"October 19, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"Copyright 2007 Ben S. Pollock Humorist Richard Allin died Thursday in Little Rock. He was 77. The following is why he's important. It's from the acknowledgments page of my journalism master's thesis, spring 2003. At the family breakfast table in Fort Smith, 30 to 35 years ago, Dad laughing would\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The Course of Words"","block_context":{"text":"The Course of Words","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/course-of-words\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":415,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2008\/03\/famous-columnist-school\/","url_meta":{"origin":258,"position":3},"title":"Famous Columnist School","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"March 14, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"Book report: The Art of Column Writing: Insider Secrets from Art Buchwald, Dave Barry Arianna Huffington, Pete Hamill and Other Great Columnists, by Suzette Martinez Standring The reviewing trade has a law that a critic doesn't write up works created by friends. It's a group of laws, actually. When a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Mr. Boo Klist"","block_context":{"text":"Mr. Boo Klist","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/mr-boo-klist\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2143,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2010\/07\/uphold-or-hold-up-standards\/","url_meta":{"origin":258,"position":4},"title":"Uphold, or Hold Up, Standards","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"July 18, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"BLOOMINGTON, Ind., Sunday, July 11, 2010 -- Indiana University feels bigger than my hometown's University of Arkansas. Yep, 1,933 acres versus 345 acres. It has a journalism school not a department, a music school not a department. It is a handsome forested campus, full of sculptures (even a huge Calder)\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bloomers"","block_context":{"text":"Bloomers","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/nsnc\/bloomington-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"NSNC Oath of Office","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/07\/Swearing-in-300x225.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":269,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2007\/02\/paving-the-road-to-heaven\/","url_meta":{"origin":258,"position":5},"title":"Paving the Road to Heaven","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"February 3, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"The recently late Art Buchwald said something to the effect of that writing political humor meant he never ran out of ideas, he had five or six every morning (when I find that quote I'll revise this). The even-more recently late Molly Ivins said something like she thanked the good\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The Course of Words"","block_context":{"text":"The Course of Words","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/course-of-words\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1502,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258\/revisions\/1502"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}