'Vice' takes nice look at naughty

Shenanigans, monkeyshines, high jinks. These are the childhood building blocks upon which the adult edifice known as Vice, in all its varied and amazing forms, is built.

And just as the Class Clown shall not lie down with the Overachiever, the tension between Vice and Virtue is an evolutionary certainty, shaping history, breaking and making careers, ruining marriages, and defining religions, cultures and philosophy. But who's having more fun?

That's the central question explored in Peter Sagal's "The Book of Vice."

Sagal, the relentlessly glib host of National Public Radio's rollicking news quiz "Wait Wait ... Don't tell Me!" offers a hilarious, arm's-length look at seven Deadly Sin-caliber vices. At each stop along the merry hedonistic way, he takes a studied, wry look at the topic, then takes us along on a personal foray into it. It's Mild-Mannered Midwesterner Meets Delilah of the Magical Thong.

Just to be clear, despite the subtitle "Very Naughty Things (and How to Do Them)," Sagal is neither advocating a capitulation in our unending Culture War, nor is he giving us a step-by-step instruction manual on Caligula's Secret Moves. And he wastes no time preaching. The world will never want for finger-waggers, so long as there are others willing to wag their other aspects.

But in taking a clear-eyed look at swingers, the porn industry, gambling and strip clubs, without the apocalyptic hand-wringing, the nature of Vice, and of ourselves, is revealed. His motivation is to span "the Vice Gap, the chasm between innocence and experience, between blue state excess and red state morality [or vice versa], between the lives of those described in Us Weekly and those reading it." In other words, there's a greasy little man inside all of us sneering in a heavy Brooklyn accent: "'Ay! I got yer social mores right here!"

Just in time for the holidays, there are chapters on Eating and Consumption (or, "keeping up with the Joneses when the Joneses are insane").

John Kerry's battle with the Swiftboaters in the 2004 election is a profound recent example. "The people lying about him wore ties, and looked calm on TV," Sagal writes. " ... And every time Kerry or his supporters got mad, and red in the face, and defensive, and insistent, they looked untrustworthy. They looked like they were lying, and thus gave credence to those who were."

Former President Bill Clinton, and his successor, President Bush, represent but two stripes of habitual fibber. Clinton was calculating, theatrical and parsed his untruthful phrases with Euclidean precision. Bush is in the mold of "Seinfeld's" George Costanza, when he gravely says: "Jerry, just remember: It's not a lie if you believe it." Which is one reason, Sagal adds, that the press largely gave Bush a pass on his whoppers about things like weapons of mass destruction and uranium in Africa, while excoriating Clinton over his more tantalizing vices. It's much more satisfying to call out the Smarty Pants than the Simpleton.

You can bet on it.