Word: capered
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Buchwald has been having a ball with the Watergate caper. Last week he fantasied a post-cease-fire briefing-as conducted by Washington's C.R.P. (Committee for the Re-Election of the President)-for Saigon politicos on how to win a Viet Nam reunification election: set up committees like "Viet Cong for Thieu," force special interests to contribute $10 million, protect donors' identity by routing contributions through Mexican banks, and send the money back to Saigon to buy "bugging equipment, miniature cameras, disappearing ink, forged letterheads-all the usual paraphernalia that anyone needs for a free and open...
Otherwise the story is a promising crime caper, involving the theft of millions of dollars worth of wine. Condon's throwaway lines have all their old weird wonder. Any one of the enormities he assigns to his characters at the rate of three a page would have fueled a complete farce. Jangling together they achieve only a certain frenzy, and give the odd impression of a man shouting desperately to avoid hearing something...
...current Washington incidents, of course, are not fully comparable with all these cases. The Watergate caper is a murky and complex fight among politicians with which few citizens can identify. As for the wheat deal, the $10 million fund for Nixon's re-election that his committee refuses to open for account, ITT and the rest - there are as yet no proven law violations...
Perseus gets the chance to recapture his youth when Athena re-Gorgonizes Medusa. Only this time Perseus has to pull off the caper without the old tricks -winged shoes, helmet of invisibility, etc. The problem is akin to that of an experienced novelist who cannot use old techniques to write a new novel, and Barth seems to get quite a chuckle...
...that Irving was planning to appropriate his victim's whole identity, to attribute to him any lie that sounded entertaining, and to rely on the assumption that Hughes was too old and too sick and too neurotic to defend himself, the whole tour de force seems less a caper than an assault. The even more basic flaw in Irving's portrait of himself as heroic caperer is his view that the gullible deserve to be gulled. "The name of the game" is a phrase that keeps coming from Suskind, who also likes to quote W.C. Fields' untrue...