From Chris Buckley’s interview on Booknotes:

“I call it [Vietnam guilt] sort of a sense of having let my country down. James Fallows has written about this very eloquently. The point he made, the point that I reiterated, was that people of my, call it class, if you will--the privileged class, the upper-middle class, whatever you want to call it--prolonged that war by not participating in it because if it had been us getting killed, our parents would have been on the phone to the congressman and the president who were running this country and saying, `Stop this goddamn war.' But as it was, it was the blue-collar kids who bore the brunt of it. And so I was left with--yeah, call them feelings of profound sadness.“

You feel profound sadness for Chris Buckley because he can’t just be himself, he’s always trying too hard to be funny or clever, and he should just say, “My dad is an asshole,” which you know is what he really thinks.