I don't want this blog to turn into the "David Ignatious Critique Site," but Ignatious is the voice of the Ivy league educated, transnational liberal elite that thinks it ought to be running things, even during GOP administrations. And that elite is looking at the endless bailouts and bourgeoning debt, and is beginning to see the handwriting on the wall - for themselves.

Ignatius now writes that the inadequate economic performance of the Obama Administration's team of Indispensables is giving rise to fears that a gathering storm is about to break. The elites don't line this one bit because they know their positions are tenuous should there be a true popular revolt at the ballot box.

First the good stuff: Ignatious draws a parallel between the early months of 2009 with another false spring:

For all the legislative commotion surrounding the economic crisis, we are still living in the equivalent of "the phony war" of 1939 and 1940. War has been declared on the Great Recession, but it's basically politics as usual. The bickering and mismanagement that helped create the crisis are continuing, even though we elected a president who promised a new start.

History tells us that phony war doesn't last forever and that when it ends, all hell breaks loose.

Utterly by coincidence, I just read "Put Out More Flags" by Evelyn Waugh, which is set during the "Phony War." Like Waugh's characters, we are aware that there is a great disruption in our world, but we have tried to adjust and live our lives normally, even as events seem to occasionally threaten to hurtle out of control. Ignatious correctly diagnoses the problem is too much "normalcy" and too little effort to man the battle stations:

One reason this season feels so political is that Obama has stacked his administration with politicians and former government officials. You might think that with the greatest financial crisis of his lifetime, the president would want a few business leaders with experience managing large organizations in crisis. But no.

I believe I have been complaining about the same thing. There are a lot of smart, innovative thinkers in America, but they have largely been shut out of the room for no better reason than they are not part of the Democrat's NYC-DC axis.

But then, Ignatious sees storm clouds and emerges with his head all wet:

What will happen if Obama's efforts fail? That's the question that really worries me when I think about history. During the 1930s, European politicians failed to solve the economic crisis through normal democratic means. So the public turned elsewhere. People became so angry with bankers and business tycoons, and with the bickering parliamentarians, that they turned to authoritarian leaders who promised national action -- in the form of fascism. That nightmare scenario may seem far off today. But there's an ugly mood developing, as people start looking for villains to blame for the economic mess.

Oh, piss off. The elites don't fear "fascism," even if they tell themselves that they are holding the line against the "ugly mood" of "people (who) start looking for villians to blame for the economic mess." They fear that Americans will revolt against the cozy Big Government world that has been built in DC since the FDR administration. And their greatest fear is that the revolt will not be lead by the easily mocked likes of Ross Perot, Ron Paul, Pat Buchanan, or Ralph Nader, but will come from someone with a large national constituency and the sort of populist appeal that DC's Indispensable Men completely lack, someone like say Sarah Palin.

Voters are not looking for "revenge." A resurgent electorate isn't going to be a pack of lumpen proles thrilling at the sight of goose-stepping brownshirts. Frankly, the increasing corporatization of the US gov't is closer to real fascism than whatever cartoon fascism that Ignatious is thinking of. Liberals love to believe that the US middle class is forever on the verge of turning to authoritarian "saviors" - the famed "dark cloud of fascism that is forever descending on America, but always lands somewhere else." Maybe it gives them a secret thrill to believe that they are holding the line against an American Gulag Archipeligo, but really it's a sign of their insularity and historical illiteracy.

We have seen this before in the querelous cries that greeting the ascension to power of Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, George W Bush, and Sarah Palin. Much of what we think of as liberal bias in the media is often directed at attacking such figures before they can permanently reform the welfare state. Many conservatives and Republicans have shown themselves to be less than stalwart in the face of media swarms that accuse them of such Modern Sins as Creationism, Racism, Oppression of the Poor, and Starving "The Children." After all these years, it should be clear that such attacks - and the furious "Nazi" insults that accompany them - are little more than an illusion stirred up by the likes of Ignatious in order to protect their world from The People for whom they claim to act.

Waugh's third novel is a departure from his first two classic satires of British society. For one thing, Black Mischief is largely set on the fictional East African island nation of Azania, although most of the characters are Brits. Second, Waugh actually has a plot that can be neatly summarized; namely that Basil Seal is a bit of a wastrel MP who travels to Azania where he hooks up with the Oxford educated Azanian Emperor Seth, who wants to bring Progressive Soviet-style government to his tribal subjects. 

In his earlier and later works, Waugh tends to mock the social mores of the British upper crust. Here, the focus of Waugh’s satire is different; he is mostly pricking at the liberal pieties of his day: animal rights, centralized planning, birth control, and the overall goal of Progress and Modernity. Waugh doesn’t really criticize these ideas, so much as he searches out the wide gap between ideals and practice. In Waugh’s view, progressive ideals are little more than abstract playthings of the rich, which fundamentally uninteresting to those on whose behalf the activists claim to be acting. Waugh also makes sure to have a couple of mercenary characters that are frankly interested in Progress because they can make a buck off of it. 

What really makes this a departure for Waugh is the richness in the storytelling. His previous books had largely been dialogue driven. “Black Mischief” shows him to be much more adept at creating a fictional universe. His descriptions of Azanian history and society are remarkably detailed. Events in the book such as native feasts, tribal wars, and an aborted coup are vividly rendered, demonstrating that one ofWaugh’s other career was as a travel writer. In many ways this is a good old fashioned travelogue of Europeans travelling through the Dark Continent. 

Despite all of this, some of the old Waugh humor still shines through. One of the many subplots involve the back and forth between the French and English ambassadors to Azania. The place is a backwater, and the British ambassador is an appropriately querulous fuddy-duddy. The French ambassador, however, carries on as if he were engaged in an East African version of the Great Game. A lot of the book’s humor comes through in these sections. 

As in Waugh’s other books, there is a dark edge among all of the humor. There is a revolution, and most of the main characters either flee or are killed. A young proto-feminist with Joycean literary pretensions comes to an especially horrifying end, supporting Waugh’s thesis that England’s leading modernists were fatally ignorant of the savagery that often lurks at the edges of the world. Azania finally becomes a League of Nations protectorate, and the last word is given to a pair of British diplomats strolling through the now-quiet streets of Azania, firmly but foolishly convinced that they have brought order to chaos. 
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This is Waugh’s second novel. It’s a very funny, very brutal satire of British society “between the wars.” It’s filled with drunks, frauds, tabloid journalists, offended sensibilities, harried inn keepers, and put-upon servants. Everyone seems to be living a Zelda & Scottie lifestyle filled with drinking, witty quips, and the occasional car crash. The plot is as heedless as the lives of its characters; it defies summary. It’s mostly a look at a glittering, hard drinking group of Bright Young Things, and the endless destruction they leave in the wake of their endless party. 

Waugh’s secret weapon is not airtight plotting, but his glittering dialogue. It’s not just the sparkling wit of its characters. Waugh captures the rhythms of speech for literally dozens of characters. These are British characters; most authors are satisfied with a bit of “’ow’s ye drink, guv’nor?” Waugh does not settle for such lazy devices. Every character’s voice seems to be pitched a particular way. You can almost hear their voices in your inner ear. 

For all of the humor and wit at work here, Waugh’s book also has a distinctly dark edge. Several characters are killed. One commits suicide. Reminders of then-contemporary events are in the background. Waugh describes a Tube platform filled with office workers wearing poppies on their lapels, a reminder that WW1 was less than a decade in the past. Waugh also hints that another destructive war (he was writing in 1930) was on its way. While the plot seems to simply shift from one drunken party to another, it also suggests that the dissolute scenes in the book are as much a result of the characters’ uncertain future, as they are a result of the characters’ relentless pursuit of pleasure. Alternatively, Waugh is also describing a fallen world whose inhabitants are stumbling drunkenly into oblivion. 

“Decline and Fall” is not just the title of Waugh’s first novel. it is also his great theme; that of the fallen state of Britain (depicted as much with humor as it is with melancholy) in the years before WW2. This book fits well within that theme. 

Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall is pungent British satire at its best. PlotwiseThe story wanders all over the place: young Paul Pennyforth is expelled from Oxford, gets a job teaching at the worst public school in the UK, gets engaged to a corrupt heiress, and then winds up in prison. The story is simply a means for Waugh to slay every sacred cow available in 1928. The dialogue in this book is incredible; there are dozens of eccentric characters, each of whom is given a chance to declaim in their own peculiar brand of Edwardian humbug. The names of the characters are great, too: Solomon Philbrick, Colonel Simpleforth, Cuttlebuck, Lord Tangent Circumfrence, etc. Mostly, Waugh plays for laughs, until the prison section when a bit of melancholy comes over the proceedings. There's also a serious theme at work: the conventions of British gentlemanliness is so smothering that its strictest adherents are reduced to the status of a feather blowing in the wind. This is satire, but it's satire with a strong literary quality.