Monocle

In the somber age of Nixon, Nikes, and Maidenform bras, we make very few demands on anyone with the courage to be funny. But even from within this abysmal temperance, we look at the latest issue of Monocle (a magazine of political satire) much like the young man watching his mother-in-law plunge over a cliff in his brand new Cadillac--with mixed emotions.

Satire, according to the dictionary, lumbers along a gamut from hone wit to loud noise, trisected in equal parts of irony, ridicule, and bitterness. Satire has to bear the burden of both entertainment and enlightenment. And to be effective, it should be written from some superior vantage--such as talent.

It has been a lost art since Voltaire and Swift, and Monocle covers the trail for another decade. "Summer 1958" is the Special H-Bomb Issue of the "leisurely quarterly"--so leisurely indeed that it flounders about for forty-eight pages of poor writing and bad makeup elicting more grimaces than grins.

Page after page Monocle employs the lead sock and mailed fist on modern civilization, its low-life and its literature. Gone is the gentle velvet touch or the cultivated wit; in its place--attended by the three old shrews of overstatement, needless elaboration, and editorial foot-note--is the effective finesse of the piledriver. Monocle Credits cleverly mention precisely what the author's parodying, to allay the confusion.

And there are lots of parodies. (Satire used to seek its own form.) There is a parody on Jack Kerouac--one of the few prose works written in the past two years worse than Kerouac's own. And an allegory for modern children. And a lamentation on income taxes in the form of a Wasteland lampoon (shattering and scattering the newly mended dissociation with a series of rhyming couplets).

Gilbert and Sullivan, the Statue of Liberty, and James Whitcomb Riley also emerge among the bloodied victims of Monocle's shillelagh subtlety. Charles J. Prentiss's "Remembrance of Past Things," some peppered nostalgia for the soap-box liberal (in poetic form), is the only passable selection in the current issue's seventeen attempts.

Evidently Monocle's still worried about the McCarthy era and the witch-hunts. Its prose and poetry are stranded between a sense of persecution and the cocktail party undergraduate skepticism which rules out being Beat or anything else with a more definitive label than lazy. America-baiting went out of intellectual fashion along with Johnny Ray, and college sophomores usually discover that if this country's not much better than most others, it's certainly no worse. Monocle hasn't made that discovery; like a little boy stealing nickles from the collection plate, it's still getting its adrenalin from being sacrilegious--long after the bogeymen have hung up their shadows and retired.

We can forgive a satire magazine for failing to be funny, or original, or mature. Or even forgive the Freudian make-up and the New Haven mailing address. But the greatest sin which satire can commit is being dull. And Monocle is better than sex for insomnia.