THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, November 19, 1995 TAG: 9511210492
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN
LENGTH: Medium: 83 lines
Urbanna newspaper columnist Mary Wakefield Buxton has received her share of valentines, over the course of more than a decade devoted to the pages of the Southside Sentinel, but she has also drawn the indelible ink of many, many poisoned pens.
As noted in her new and wonderfully readable collection, One Woman's Opinion (Rappahannock Press, 181 pp., $12.50), Buxton has been variously pronounced by readers:
An uppity woman.
A bitch.
A feminazi.
A lesbian.
A damn Yankee.
A nut.
A left-wing radical.
A right-wing fundamentalist.
Among other things. Buxton would be hard pressed to live up to all these accusations at once; but I can certify that she is, in fact and preeminently, a nut.
It takes one to know one.
Newspaper columnists must possess quantifiable measures of nut blood to scribble tirelessly on for generally miniscule pay and largely maximal abuse. We all share magnificent and complimentary delusions that we have something excruciatingly important to say and that readers desperately want to hear it. The historic and documented response to both notions is, invariably: not all the time.
So Mary Wakefield Buxton, 55, routinely receives from strangers such deathless messages as these:
``Mrs. Buxton, I've called you on the telephone today to tell you something very important. You have become the devil's agent on earth.''
``Mary, my friends and I wondered if you would consider giving up writing opinion and shifting over to a column on cooking.''
``I liked your speech, Mrs. Buxton. It was just irritating enough.''
Some years ago, publisher Bennett Cerf was congratulated by a fan that his company, Random House, saw fit to publish books from so many divergent perspectives. The fan said it spoke well of Random House and of the United States that Americans were interested in alternative viewpoints. But Cerf shrugged.
He observed that people in general only bought books with views in them that they agreed with; Cerf was only pandering to our prejudices after all.
So conservatives read William F. Buckley Jr. and liberals read William Raspberry. Americans - and, indeed, everybody else - prefer to hear their own views parroted back to them brilliantly. It absolves them of doubt.
And mental effort.
``In a free society,'' Buxton writes, ``we must risk being offended in order to be free. We must be exposed to much thought and ideas that help us grow insight on truth.''
We need this woman, particularly when we disagree with her.
One opportunity: ``With the shock of a sexual assault incidence in downtown Urbanna recently, surely the least place where one might expect a violent crime to occur, the tactics of Annie Oakley come to mind. Here's some conservative advice, ladies. If you live alone, get a gun and learn how to use it.''
There are other opportunities. Buxton defends the public display of the Confederate flag but opposes the desecration of Old Glory. She wrestles with an Episcopalean God but reproaches the Pope.
She's argumentative, inconsistent and emotional. Politically incorrect, she spares no one, least of all herself. She lets it all hang out - her intermittently shaken faith, her occasional marital difficulties, her affronted Ohio origins and come-here Virginia tribulations.
I love her. Most of all, when I disagree with her. Because she's passionate to report her views as she sees them, which forces me to reexamine my own.
Buxton began at the Sentinel as a kind of regional Erma Bombeck and has since found her own more controversial, and oft raised, voice; it deserves to be heard, not in spite of, but because of, her critics:
``I'm curious, Mrs. Buxton. Did your mother love you?''
Not all the time. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia Wesleyan
College. by CNB