Virtuous Reality

Joe Queenan, the mean-spirited essayist who’s built his career around insult, admits he’s slung a lot of mud through the years. Geraldo Rivera, Sting and Susan Sarandon top his list of more than 25,000 people, places and institutions he estimates he’s potshotted. So it may surprise fans that for six months, Queenan renounced his nastiness and saw the liberal light.

He purged his life of all politically incorrect materials and began practicing truly random acts of kindness, such as sending a box of groceries to Linda Tripp and personally delivering an obscure CD to an unsuspecting fan.

In embracing do-goodism, he inadvertently pressed the pause button on his career as a freelancer for Movieline, Rolling Stone, People, Esquire, GQ, Vogue and Newsweek, none of which was interested in the cleaned-up Queenan. His misadventures have not been in vain, however. “My Goodness: A Cynic’s Short-Lived Search for Sainthood” (Hyperion, 1999), in bookstores today, chronicles Queenan’s round-trip journey from professional misanthropy to virtuousness and back. Here, the author talks about what he learned.

Question: What prompted your change from sinner to saint?

Answer: The way I work is I wake up every day and I read four or five newspapers, and I look for the three stupidest things people did to use as material to make fun of. A lot of times they’re misfortunes that aren’t funny, but they will be when you finish writing about them.

Q: What was the most difficult aspect of your transformation?

A: The language. When you start doing stuff like getting the T-shirts that say “Columbus Didn’t Discover the New World, He Invaded It,” there’s a flaccidity to the language that is appalling to a professional writer.

Q: How did people react to your switch from black shirts and jeans to clothing with politically correct slogans?

A: If you wear a Lakers shirt, that evokes one thing. They think, he’s a jock or something, or he’s probably going to vote for Bush. But if you wear “Practice Random Acts of Kindness and Senseless Acts of Beauty,” on so many levels you connect with people.

One of the things that’s interesting about this sort of virtuous haberdashery is that a lot of the messages are not simple. In the old days, it used to be “End the War” or “End Racism” or “Dump Nixon.” There are so many long slogans . . . and when you’re driving behind people and they’ve got a lot of those bumper stickers, you’d have to follow the person about 20 miles just to take it all in. The Greeks had Socrates and Aristotle, the French had Rousseau, and we have these stupid bumper stickers.

Q: What culinary sacrifices did you make in the writing of this book?

A: I would eat in vegetarian restaurants out of some sort of sense that if you ate in a Tibetan restaurant you might help the Dalai Lama get his country back, although that seems highly unlikely. . . . If you ate in a French restaurant, you wouldn’t think it was going to help the French shut down their nuclear power plants or become nicer, but when you eat in a Tibetan restaurant, there’s always that thing about 1.2% of this goes to help the Dalai Lama appear in another Martin Scorsese movie.

Q: You purged your CD collection of all politically incorrect bands, which meant you had to give up the Rolling Stones and start listening to Ani DiFranco. Did your opinion of her change at all during those six months?

A: No, not at all. I just wanted to get rid of the record as soon as I could. After I’d purged my collection, I had about 37 CDs I could listen to. I was listening to her and Suzanne Vega and Sting and REM all the time. Michael Stipe once said the Beatles were elevator music. Well, if they’re elevator music, I don’t know what REM is. I don’t want to be in that elevator.

Q: What prompted the end of this phase?

A: It was too fatiguing. I just thought, the hell with it. Let me go back to being mean. There were so many tempting stories that seemed like such great, great topics. . . . Robin Williams had a whole bunch of horrible movies out around then. I saw “Jack” and “Toys” and “What Dreams May Come” on the same day. I thought he just has to be stopped, and he hasn’t been.

Q: Have you had a chance yet to eviscerate him?

A: I drop him into stories a lot as just sort of an aside. The thing about Robin Williams is I think even he knows now that people are sick of these movies. That he’s just becoming a laughingstock because all the movies are based on the idea that if you’d just be more like him, life would be OK. I’d rather be more like Pierce Brosnan. At least Pierce Brosnan is a better dresser.

Q: How does it feel to be back to your old cynical self?

A: Great, because it’s just so much more lucrative.

Q: So you’re a better bad person than good?

A: Definitely. I think largely because I was born in Philadelphia, because Philadelphia’s a really nasty city. All that City of Brotherly Love stuff is absolute nonsense.