Title: Nothing Is Wrong And Here Is Why
Author: Alexandra Petri
Themes/Subjects: Satire, Politics, Socioeconomics, Race Relations, Individuality, Feminism
Three Words to Describe the Essays: Biting, Sarcastic, Witty
Favorite Essay: 'What to Call Racist Remarks Instead of Calling Them Racist Remarks'
Blurb from Back of Book: “In Nothing Is Wrong and Here Is Why, acclaimed Washington Post satirist Alexandra Petri offers perfectly logical, reassuring reasons for everything that has happened in recent American politics that will in no way unsettle your worldview.
In essays both new and adapted from her viral Washington Post columns, Petri reports that the Trump administration is as competent as it is uncorrupted, white supremacy has never been less rampant, and men have been silenced for too long. The “woman card” is a powerful card to play! Q-Anon makes perfect sense! This Panglossian venture into our swampy present offers a virtuosic first draft of history―a parody as surreal and deranged as the Trump administration itself.
‘One of the difficulties of being alive today,’ she notes, ‘is that everything is absurd but fewer and fewer things are funny.’ Written with devastating wit that reveals a persistent, perhaps manic optimism about her benighted country, Petri’s essays have become iconic expressions of rage and anger, read and liked and shared by hundreds of thousands of people. Nothing Is Wrong and Here Is Why shows why she has emerged as the preeminent political satirist of her generation.”
Summary and Comments: First thing’s first—while these are all technically essays, what you really need to know is that they are also a collection of columns that Petri has written for her job at the Washington Post. Some of them are long, and some of them are short, but all of them are sarcastic and satirical takes on politics in the age of Trump, feminism and the #MeToo Movement, and the broader issue of race relations at the beginning of the third decade of the twenty-first century.
There are very few swings-and-misses in the entire collection, and the kinds of essays/columns she writes are lengthy and varied. In one of the first pieces of the collection, titled ‘Waiting for a Pivot: A GOP Tragicomedy,' written in June of 2016, Petri writes a scene-length play where she renames Paul Ryan and Reince Preibus as Vladimir Ryan and Estragon Preibus, and the content of the play itself is just a conversation back and forth between the two of them, lamenting that they are about to nominate a man for their party's presidential ticket who was a Democrat for most of his life, has said rather controversial things on the campaign trail (putting it mildly), and pokes fun at how they, as part of the GOP establishment, threw the entire kitchen sink at the man they didn’t support who was running for the nomination, and ending up with a reality-show TV star as their standard bearer at the end of the day. The ‘essay’ is seven pages long, but that’s the point here: it doesn’t read as an essay or a column. It exists in this weird nebulous form of writing that is still effective and biting in its sarcasm. Petri has used her short column space to create this brilliant piece of satire in the form of a script, and it reads as if someone could actually take it right from the page and make an SNL skit out of it.
In a similar vein, a piece not long after that, titled ‘Donald Trump and His Sons Will Never Talk Business Again,’ published in January of 2017 before the U.S. would discover that the president would not, in fact, divest himself of his businesses while in office, consists of a series of conversations between Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Jr., and Eric Trump. It shows them eating dinner at various times of the year, one for each season, and they struggle to talk about anything besides the family businesses. When they can’t actually think of anything non-business to talk about, they all fall silent, and it turns to the next season. At one point, Eric Trump pulls out a poem to read that he wrote, but, in an attempt to poke fun at Donald Trump’s lack of everyday reading, she has him slipping it back into his pocket instead of reading it aloud while they all eat dinner together, an effective way to comment both on the Donald-Eric relationship, as SNL has done effectively over the last four years, and the mere fact that everything in the Trump boys’ world ultimately leads back to the family business.
This collection is far from just about Trump though. Petri takes on many other hot-button issues and themes of the day: feminism (‘Nasty Women,’ a parody that turns all feminists into witches who brew anti-men potions in their liberal cauldrons during Halloween while slyly showing the hypocrisy and misogyny of such a label), truth, or the lack thereof (‘The True, Correct Story of What Happened at Donald Trump’s Inauguration,’ where Petri takes the claims that Sean Spicer made in his first press conference with reporters and exaggerates them to even more hilarious lengths, all of them laughably false and in the same vein of wacky claims that dictators like King Jong Un make at times), the idea of being a moderate in today’s charged political climate (‘A Moderate Speaks: By God, Won’t Someone Else Take a Stand?’ which skewers moderates on both sides of the aisle via a made-up speech that completely ignores the sentimentality of the feigned belief of moderation in today’s charged political climate), and sexual assault allegations related to political figures (‘HOW DARE YOU DO THIS TO BRETT KAVANAUGH?’ which is a column written in the form of a speech and reads like what chauvinistic males think females might sound like when they accuse them of being emotional, but flipping the gender roles and showing how hypocritical the stereotype of ‘females are too emotional to lead’ is).
In one section of the book titled ‘Routine Nightmares and Soothing Fables,’ Petri groups together a collection of columns that comment mostly on white privilege, writing pieces that showcase and satirize Adolf Hitler’s childhood (the point being to show that the myth of him being a spoiled artist actually relates back to him simply being an angry man), the hypocrisy of Neo-Nazism, and the idea of white privilege being a sacred American institution. In another section titled ‘Modest Proposals and Other Commentary,’ she takes aim at the older generations, such as the Boomers and Generation X, through pieces titled ‘How to Sleep at Night When Families Are Being Separated at the Border’ and ‘I Am Sick of These Children Demanding Safe Spaces.’ The pieces, with titles that are both blatant and stinging, seek to challenge the accepted norms of America today, or the phrase ‘that’s just the way it is,’ the types of mindsets that Petri implies that those two generations have allowed to overtake them and what led to today’s world of problems. The pieces skewer how Boomers and Xers make fun of Millennials and Gen Z for things such as ‘safe spaces’ and becoming more and more secular as time goes by, and she notes the seeming hypocrisy in such sentiments by showing that the groundwork that led to such generational shifts began with Boomers and their lifestyle choices and continued with Generation X.
All in all, the collection is a fantastic one, with all of the columns no longer than ten pages at most. Clocking in at a modest 215 pages, I breezed through the collection in two days, and I felt lighter after I read it. If you’re looking for a book that examines the problems of today’s American society, but does it in a way that is humorous, enlightening, and ultimately winking at us while smirking about how clever it is, this collection is for you.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Where to Find It: Library Catalog, Amazon, Boswell Books
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