P. J. O’Rourke, RIP

P. J. O’Rourke died yesterday at the age of 74. He was one of the best conservative pundits of the last 50 years and certainly the funniest. He also had a keen eye. In his 1990 classic Parliament of Whores, he provided a spot-on synopsis of the people you meet at a protest rally. Tell me if these descriptions from 30+ years ago still don’t ring true:

World Council of Churches sensible-shoe types who have self-righteousness the way some people have bad breath

Angry black poverty pests making a life and a living off the misfortunes of others

Even angrier feminists doing their best to feminize poverty before the blacks use it all up

Earnest neophyte Marxists, eyes glazed from dialectical epiphanies and hands grubby from littering the Mall with ill-Xeroxed tracts

College bohos dressed in black to show how gloomy the world is when you’re a nineteen-year-old rich kid

Young would-be hippies dressed exactly like old hippies used to dress (remarkable how behind the times the avant-garde has gotten)

And some of those old hippies themselves, faded jeans straining beneath increasing paunches, hair still tied into a ponytail in the back but gone forever from the top

His powers of observation set him apart from other writers, especially those who tried their hand at satire. He understood his targets better than the targets understood themselves.

As O’Rourke grew older, he softened the sharp edges and some of his thinking got a bit pear-shaped. He drew the ire of conservatives everywhere when he endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016. I was not a fan of Donald Trump either, but O’Rourke’s powers of observation betrayed him that time:

Dorothy and Toto’s house fell on Hillary. I endorse her.

Munchkins endorse her.

Donald Trump is a flying monkey.

Except what the flying monkeys have to say, “oreoreoreo,” makes more sense than Trump’s policy statements.

Not that Hillary makes much sense either.

Hillary is wrong about everything. She is to politics and statecraft what Pope Urban VIII and the Inquisition were to Galileo. She thinks the sun revolves around herself.

But Trump Earth™ is flat. We’ll sail over the edge. Here be monsters.

O’Rourke was wrong about that. Hillary is more of a monster in real life than anything O’Rourke could imagine over the edge. We’ll leave that aside. Where O’Rourke made his mark, and where his legacy will reside, is in being a proto-Mencken for our age. And let’s say it — his bon mots were pretty bon:

There are probably more fact-finding tours of Nicaragua right now than there are facts— the country has shortages of practically everything.

Or this:

The second item in the liberal creed, after self-righteousness, is unaccountability. Liberals have invented whole college majors— psychology, sociology, women’s studies— to prove that nothing is anybody’s fault. No one is fond of taking responsibility for his actions, but consider how much you’d have to hate free will to come up with a political platform that advocates killing unborn babies but not convicted murderers. A callous pragmatist might favor abortion and capital punishment. A devout Christian would sanction neither. But it takes years of therapy to arrive at the liberal view.

Or this:

Even the bad things are better than they used to be. Bad music, for instance, has gotten much briefer. Wagner’s Ring Cycle takes four days to perform while “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm” by the Crash Test Dummies lasts little more than three minutes.

But above all, this:

The American political system is like a gigantic Mexican Christmas fiesta. Each political party is a huge piñata — a papier-mâché donkey, for example. The donkey is filled with full employment, low interest rates, affordable housing, comprehensive medical benefits, a balanced budget and other goodies. The American voter is blindfolded and given a stick. The voter then swings the stick wildly in every direction, trying to hit a political candidate on the head and knock some sense into the silly bastard.

We all need our sticks and few wielded a more elegant brickbat than the Irish kid from Toledo. RIP,

8 thoughts on “P. J. O’Rourke, RIP

  1. Totally agree about Parliament of Whores. Life changing book.

    O’Rourke was wrong about [Hillary]

    He was kinda wrong about Pope Urban VIII and Galileo too – or at least the story is more complicated that can be condensed into another bon mot.

  2. Powerline noted this quote from one of his visits to Minnesota:

    “A few years ago, you elected a man to be governor who was clearly insane. Jesse Ventura was a bold experiment and, with him, you proved a great truth: Crazy politicians aren’t much different than regular politicians. But you may be going too far with Al Franken.”

  3. O’Rourke: “She’s wrong about absolutely everything, but she’s wrong within normal parameters.”
    The “normal parameters” are what is wrong, and, what’s more, the effort to keep within the normal parameters leads inevitably to their collapse.

  4. “Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.”

    RIP

  5. This is sad. I enjoyed his writing and musings.

    I wish that he was able to comment of the Durham revelations about Hillary committing a crime that makes Watergate look like Sunday picnic. Woodward and Bernstein, where are you? Your Watergate crap just got usurped.

  6. Mr O’Rourke had a highly developed sense of humor, a deep-seated irony, and an ego that he poked fun at. He was an equal opportunity satirist and a very astute observer of the inanities of this world.

  7. I’ve got several of his books, plus the Omnibus collection of articles and essays. It’s so hard to pick a favorite quote, but one that I’m always going back to is his trip to Nicaragua (along with the American leftist glitterati that he called “Sandalistas”) to cover the expected reelection of Ortega over Chamorro. Everyone was shocked, but for different reasons:

    I hadn’t come to Nicaragua prepared for such joy. Like most readers of papers and watchers of newscasts, I thought the Sandinistas were supposed to win this one. I’m a member of the working press; you’d think I’d know better than to listen to journalists. But there’s a little bit of the pigeon in every good confidence man. I even believed the February 21st ABC-Washington Post poll that had Ortega leading Chamorro by sixteen percentage points. That is – I blush to admit this – I accepted the results of an opinion poll taken in a country where it was illegal to hold certain opinions. You can imagine the poll-taking process: “Hello, Mr. Peasant, I’m an inquisitive and frightening stranger. God knows who I work for. Would you care to ostensibly support the dictatorship which controls every facet of your existence, or shall we put you down as in favor of the UNO opposition and just tear up your ration card right here and now?”

    A couple more timeless and trenchant observations:
    When a government controls both the economic power of individuals and the coercive power of the state … this violates a fundamental rule of happy living: Never let the people with all the money and the people with all the guns be the same people.

    Ideology, politics and journalism, which luxuriate in failure, are impotent in the face of hope and joy.

  8. Pingback: “I’m Not A Liberal, So I’m Not An Expert At Stuff I Know Nothing About” | Shot in the Dark

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