Book: So This Is Depravity

Overview
So This Is Depravity (1980) gathers Russell Baker’s wry, observational humor from his New York Times “Observer” column into a compact portrait of late-1970s American life. Written by a journalist who could turn civics into comedy without losing moral clarity, the pieces balance satire with an affectionate regard for ordinary people trying to navigate the era’s political melodramas, economic pinch, and cultural fads. The result is a panoramic scrapbook of public folly and private exasperations, sharpened by Baker’s elegant prose and steady deadpan.

Scope and Structure
The collection assembles short essays originally published across the decade leading up to 1980. Baker moves restlessly among Washington, the press corps, Main Street, and the living room, treating each as a stage where language, official, commercial, or domestic, spins away from common sense. He alternates conventional columns with set pieces that mimic bureaucratic memos, hearing transcripts, announcements, or letters, using the forms of power to puncture its pretensions. Because each entry is a self-contained column, the book reads like a mosaic; the cumulative pattern is what matters, not a single continuous argument.

Subjects and Themes
Public life furnishes abundant targets. Baker satirizes the capital’s appetite for drama after Watergate, the government’s fondness for jargon, and the inflation-and-energy years that turned policy talk into a steady drizzle of euphemisms. Presidents and aspirants drift through as characters in a long-running farce, figures who promise renewal yet speak in committee-approved clichés. He skewers media habits too, noting how the press can inflate minor absurdities into national sagas and miss the plain story in front of it.

Private life receives equal attention. Baker delights in the tribulations of travel, the sidelong wars with technology and appliances, the incomprehensible instructions that accompany consumer goods, and the martial art of standing in line. He has fun with self-help crazes and educational panaceas, viewing them as symptoms of a national urge to package wisdom while evading work. In one vein he portrays language itself as a mischievous accomplice: words that once meant something have been pressed into duty as salesmanship, propaganda, or therapeutic haze.

The title points to a recurring joke about moral panics. “Depravity” becomes the grand, slightly ridiculous word people reach for when faced with inconveniences and petty scandals. Baker’s point is less that America is corrupt than that it is chronically theatrical about its anxieties, and that this theatricality is comic, even lovable, when not dangerous.

Style and Voice
Baker’s humor is gentle, exacting, and cumulative. He favors understatement over punch lines, cultivating a courtly exasperation that lets readers supply the laugh. He writes clean sentences that smuggle barbs in through rhythm and diction, and he is especially deft at parodying official speech. Instead of scolding, he exaggerates premises just enough to reveal their silliness; the satire lands because he sounds like the very people he is satirizing.

Context and Significance
Appearing soon after Baker’s Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, the book showcases why his column was so widely trusted: it made readers feel sane without inviting cynicism. The pieces capture the era’s mixture of fatigue and resilience, after scandal, amid economic strain, with television and expertise redefining public discourse. As a collection, So This Is Depravity preserves a specific American mood while demonstrating a timeless method: expose pomposity, cherish common sense, and keep the jokes humane.