Everybody Knows: Cynicism in America

""[C]ynicism is... a way of life against belief or after its exhaustion,"" Chaloupka observes in this maddening treat of a book, adding that good reasons for cynicism go far beyond individual incidents (such as Watergate or Whitewater) to structural and systemic causes. Hearkening back to Diogenes, the Federalist papers and H.L. Mencken, Chaloupka, a professor of political science and environmental studies at the University of Minnesota, calls up a menagerie of different kinds of cynics and cynicism, never bothering to make his sketches and digressions fit together into a coherent whole. Along the way, he draws a fundamental distinction between ""cynics-in-power""' and ""wig cynics"" such as the militia movement and others influenced by what Chaloupka calls a ""jumbled, postrationalist, unreal aesthetic of weird causation."" At first, Chaloupka seems to promise rigorous argument and clear explication, but this expectation is repeatedly dashed. Arguments start, examples interrupt, premises are restated and then he's off on a new tangent. This may well be deliberate. Eventually, readers are introduced to another strain, the life-affirming ""kynic""--closer to the original Greek--who plays with rules, power and morality. The kynic is a figure more like Charlie Chaplin than Richard Nixon. Discussions of resentment, backlash and stoicism, drawing, respectively, on Nietzsche, Susan Faludi and the Coen brothers' film Fargo, simultaneously enrich the speculation and enhance the frustration of resolution denied. (Sept.)