NOTHING IS WRONG AND HERE IS WHY

A collection of columns that provides sharp political humor in these serious times.

As a columnist for the Washington Post, Petri shows that we’ve come a long way since Art Buchwald. Her barbed perspective owes more to the cinematic surrealism of David Lynch, conjuring a reality where what was once thought impossible has become improbably normal. As she explains in the introduction, “we have much less need of imagination than we did before. People once had to produce parodies and caricatures to imagine all the ways things could go wrong. But now—we need simply watch.” Petri has watched and taken notes amid the new normal of the Trump administration. In one column, she takes up Trump’s persona, lamenting, “I thought I had the best team ever assembled, but I had a big coat full of skunks, six rejected concepts for Batman villains, and a disembodied voice that yells rude things in the Quiet Car.” Evoking Macbeth in a column titled “Nasty Women,” Petri reveals the cabal of witches who are determined to keep Trump from prevailing. They “have an election to rig. They must make haste. The vagenda is quite full.” Evoking Beckett’s Godot, she puts Vladimir and Estragon on the periphery of Trump’s inner circle, waiting in vain for the promised pivot toward the center, away from the radical extremes of his rhetoric. As is usually the case with collections of columns from a daily paper, the results are varied (more hits than misses), and the humor depends on one’s political persuasion. Yet Petri’s vision is consistently more prescient than dated, and she gives a powerful voice to the resistance of Black Lives Matter and #MeToo. From her very first words—“Relax. Nothing Is Wrong”—she warns readers to be very, very afraid.

An instructive demonstration of how alternative truths play themselves out.