Book World; Surviving A Quayle Presidency; A Humorist's View: It Wouldn't Matter
Joe Queenan is by his own admission a conservative and he seems on the evidence to be a Republican, but he comes to the pressing question of Dan Quayle with a bracing supply of irreverence. It is apparent from "Imperial Caddy," Queenan's penetrating skin-depth study of the incumbent vice president, that he holds Dan Quayle in slight regard and Marilyn Quayle in no regard at all, perhaps indeed in negative regard, but he goes beyond such frivolous considerations to ask the only question that really counts: Who cares?</br></br>Or, to put another way: Is there any point in caring since it really doesn't matter? Queenan is of the persuasion - one that finds new adherents every time a national administration swings into "action" - that the presidency and vice presidency are essentially irrelevant. The "Ur-truth about the American system of government," he says, is: "It takes a licking but it keeps on ticking. If 24 lawyer presidents and 32 lawyer vice presidents couldn't destroy it during its first two centuries of existence, nothing can."</br></br>Thus it is that Queenan views the possibility of a Quayle presidency - the possibility seemed considerably more real as he was writing than it does at the moment - with sublime equanimity. He does worry a bit about what it might do to the stock market, not to mention the market in Quayle autographs, but beyond that he is of the view that Quayle "would just be another forgettable chief executive in another era when the rest of us simply got on with our business, which is, for the most part, business."</br></br>This is a statement calculated to infuriate those on both sides of the political Maginot Line who really do believe that the fate of humankind hangs in the balance each election day, but then, calculated provocation is Queenan's stock in trade. In the course of his meandering inquiry into the Quayle psyche he manages to take swipes at every target that passes his way. One of these is the great state of Indiana, which harbors a "strange mixture of gullibility, mediocrity and weirdness," and which boasts the nation's oddest favorite sons and daughters: "Nobody gets famous in {Indiana} unless he or she has a really strange name. George Barr McKutcheon. Booth Tarkington. W. Axl Rose. Edward Eggleston. David Lee Roth. Kurt Vonnegut. Deanna Mertle. LaToya Jackson. Cole Porter. Thelma Cudlipp. Bear in mind that the Senate seat won by James Danforth Quayle in 1980 had been occupied for the previous 18 years by a man named Birch Bayh, who had won the seat from an 18-year veteran named Homer Capehart. J. Danforth Quayle got into politics at the behest of a Hoosier big shot named Orvas Beers, and the principal influence in his life has been his grandfather Eugene C. Pulliam, a conservative who simply hated people like Birch Bayh and, were he alive, would probably hate the current occupant of the governor's mansion - Evan Bayh - even more. In Indiana, even the fictional characters - Carrie Meeber, Kilgore Trout - have weird names. Jesus, what kind of name is Ben-Hur?"</br></br>No Hoosier arouses Queenan to greater scorn than Marilyn Quayle. "Something in the way she moved suggested a space oddity," he says, and later calls her a "truly gothic American archetype" possessed of "supreme weirdness." Reaching back into ancient history he recalls one wit's observation about Thomas E. Dewey - "You have to know Mr. Dewey very well in order to dislike him" - and adds: "Ditto Marilyn Quayle."