Sheila observes that today is PJ O’Rourke’s birthday.

O’Rourke is, of course, one of the short list of writers who started me on the road from left to right, twenty-odd years ago (the others being Dostoevskii, Paul Johnson and Solzhenitzyn).

Red’s favorite O’Rourke quotes:

— A hat should be taken off when you greet a lady and left off for the rest of your life. Nothing looks more stupid than a hat.

— Fish is the only food that is considered spoiled once it smells like what it is.

— With Epcot Center the Disney corporation has accomplished something I didn’t think possible in today’s world. They have created a land of make-believe that’s worse than regular life.

— In fact, safety has no place anywhere. Everything that’s fun in life is dangerous. Horse races, for instance, are very dangerous. But attempt to design a safe horse and the result is a cow (an appalling animal to watch at the trotters.) And everything that isn’t fun is dangerous too. It is impossible to be alive and safe.

— There are a lot of mysterious things about boats, such as why anyone would get on one voluntarily.

— To grasp the true meaning of socialism, imagine a world where everything is designed by the post office, even the sleaze.

— The French are a smallish, monkey-looking bunch and not dressed any better, on average, than the citizens of Baltimore. True, you can sit outside in Paris and drink little cups of coffee, but why this is more stylish than sitting inside and drinking large glasses of whiskey I don’t know.

— Bachelors know all about parties. In fact, a good bachelor is a living, breathing party all by himself. At least that is what my girlfriend said when she found the gin bottles under the couch. I believe her exact words were, “You’re a disgusting, drunken mess.” And that’s a good description of a party, if it’s done right.

— Ecology is the science of everything. Nobody knows everything. Nobody even knows everything about any one thing. And most of us don’t know much. Say it’s ten-thirty on a Saturday night. Where are your teenage children? I didn’t ask where they said they were going. Where are they really? What are they doing? Who are they with? Have you met the other kids’ families? And what is tonight’s pot smoking, wine-cooler drinking, and sex in the backseats of cars going to mean in a hundred years? Now extend these questions to the entire solar system.

— Are we disheartened by the breakup of the family? Nobody who ever met my family is.

— It’s hard to come back from the Balkans and not sound like a Pete Seeger song.

— People who are wise, good, smart, skillful, or hardworking don’t need politics, they have jobs.

— Earnestness is just stupidity sent to college.

And the one I’ve, perhaps predictably, loved since I saw it in Parliament of Whores: “I’m not a liberal, so I’m not an expert at stuff I know nothing about”. But the best O’Rourke of all – and perhaps the one still most applicable in this day of demands for multilateralism – is O’Rourke’s ringing defense of the cowboy diplomat, fifteen years before anyone called them that (below the fold).

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In reading Swiftee’s response to Michael Moore’s snark to disheartened conservatives, he said something that got me thinking:

You talk about “being in a funk”. Mikey, you cannot imagine our dismay when it became obvious that none of your big mouthed, anti-American buddies really didn’t have the balls to follow through with their childish little threats to leave the country in ’04, but we’ve gotten over it.

Hey – I don’t recall any conservatives threatening to leave the country if the election didn’t go their way.

I also didn’t hear anyone yapping about seceding from the union and joining a nation friendlier to conservative beliefs.

Hm. Not that I’d ever say such a thing, but it’d almost seem that conservatives care more about this country…

There are a few famous people from my hometown, Jamestown North Dakota; Peggy Lee, Louis L’Amour, Darren Erstad, MN Third District congressman Jim Ramstad, disc jockey Shadoe Stevens…

…and, in a deep dig into the trivia bank, Harley Venton, longtime character actor and former soap opera star, a former student of my dad’s. I’d always known Harley was one of those rare critters – a character actor that does pretty well.

I’d had no idea exactly how well he had done:

In 1983, ABC expressed interest in Venton for the role of David Addison in the show, Moonlighting. Venton screen-tested for the role of Addison in September 1984. Cybill Shepherd wanted Venton to play Addison, but producer Glen Gordon Caron ultimately gave the role role to Bruce Willis. Venton was the only other actor to be screen-tested, and that screen test can still be viewed on the DVD copy of the pilot for Moonlighting.

Wow. Who knew?

And while it’s hard to imagine anyo9ne but Willis in that role (and harder still to imagine Harley Venton starring in Die Hard), it’s pretty cool to hear about.

On the one hand, who better to cover the Neil Young classic “Cinnamon Girl” than Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoffs?

Cool.

On the other hand, time is not being especially kind to Sweet [compare and contrast].

Perhaps a name change to “Matthew Nutrasweet” is in order?

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The City Pages’ review of Borat takes an all-too-predictable turn – which sparked an idea.

More on the idea in a bit; first, the drearily-predictable turn. Apparently, Sacha Baren-Cohen does what is in Hollywood nearly unthinkable – satirizes conservative caricatures!:

That both Barr and Keyes are right-wing moralizers suggests something about the Baron Cohen agenda. It’s hardly coincidental that the antique store he trashes specializes in Confederate memorabilia. Interviewing “veteran feminists” or Atlanta homies, Borat baffles them with his chauvinist stupidity. But picked up by a van of South Carolina frat boys or chatting with the owner of the Imperial Rodeo, he has alarmingly little difficulty getting them to articulate the idea of reinstituting slavery or making homosexuality a capital offense.

Wow. I guess rednecks and fratboys are stupid! Especially after their japes, y’know, get through an editing process!

Baron Cohen has gleefully involved the government of Kazakhstan in a campaign against Borat—showing up at the White House on the day President Bush hosted Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev. But his target isn’t really an imaginary version of Nazerbayev’s nation (nor its enemies, the “evil nitwits” of Uzbekistan); it is rather the domain of the “great warlord Premier Bush,” red states in particular. “I think the cultural differences are just vast,” the Mississippi matron hosting Borat for dinner at her Magnolia Mansion (on Secession Drive) confides to the camera while her guest is away from the table. Those differences become unbridgeable when Borat returns with a stool sample, and then with the arrival of his indescribably inappropriate date—recruited from the back-page ads of the local alt-weekly.

The City Pages have managed to make Borat sound as interesting as a poli-sci masters dissertation.

The review makes much of Baren-Cohen’s “agenda” – and how eagerly many conveniently-lampoonable right-wing middle Americans queue up to serve as comic fodder for it.

But I have to wonder – given that:

• Americans love to be on TV, and
• there’s nobody in the world as smug and personally-overweening as a Twin Cities’ liberal,

…I think that if a film crew from “People’s Television of Berkeley” (or perhaps a French TV documentary crew) showed up at Macalester or Nordeast or in Merriam Park, you’d get at least as much comic fodder.

Hmmmm.

I say again – Hmmmm.

Anyone got a camera?