Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
"Good writers make you want to read, but great writers make you want to write." Matt Labash on what made P.J. O'Rourke great
P. J. O'Rourke, 1947-2022 Brilliant writer, beautiful soul
Many people, including Jake Tapper and Piers Morgan, are mourning the death of conservative humorist P.J. O'Rourke.
The author and satirist, known for such works as Don't Vote It Just Encourages the Bastards and How the Hell Did This Happen?, passed away Tuesday morning at the age of 74, according to the Associated Press. The Daily Beast has reported his death was due to complications from lung cancer. After word of his death spread and became widely known, many took to social media to pass along their condolences and share their thoughts and feelings about the longtime writer.
Jake Tapper, Others Mourn Passing of Conservative Humorist P.J. O'Rourke
THE CONSERVATIVE WRITER P.J. O’Rourke, author of 20 books, died on Tuesday at age 74. For decades O’Rourke appeared constantly on television and radio shows because they always needed someone both right-wing and funny, and he was the only such person available
Farewell to P.J. O’Rourke, America’s Only (Semi-)Funny Conservative
P.J. O’Rourke, who has died at the age of 74, once hosted a small New Year’s party at his apartment in Washington. The year was 1990. He’d just returned from Germany, where he had covered the fall of the Berlin Wall
P.J. O'Rourke was America's greatest satirist and coolest conservative
Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.
P.J. O’Rourke, Celebrated Journalist and Conservative Satirist, Dead at 74
The writer served as foreign-affairs desk chief at Rolling Stone and wrote for numerous publications
One of the best essays I have ever read is P.J. O’Rourke’s “The Death of Communism: Berlin, November 1989” from his essay collection Give War a Chance. O’Rourke was the foreign correspondent for Rolling Stone in the late 1980s and early 90s and reported from many Cold War hotspots. In this essay, O’Rourke writes poignantly and humorously about the collapse of the Berlin Wall. First, he contrasts the free Germans of West Berlin with their communist brethren on the other side of the wall:
West Germans are tall, pink, pert and orthodontically corrected. With hands, teeth and hair as clean as their clothes and clothes as sharp as their looks. Except for the fact that they all speak English pretty well, they’re indistinguishable from Americans. East Germans seem to have been hunching over cave fires a lot. They’re short and thick with sallow, lardy fat, and they have Khrushchev warts. There’s something about Marxism that brings out warts–the only kind of growth this economic system encourages.
Upon seeing an East German border guard ask for a piece of the wall that was being torn down, O’Rourke writes:
I looked at that and I began to cry.
I really didn’t understand before that moment, I didn’t realize until just then–we won. The Free World won the Cold War. The fight against life-hating, soul-denying, slavish communism–which had shaped the world’s politics this whole wretched century–was over.
And the best thing about our victory was the way we did it–not just with ICBMs and Green Berets and aid to the contras. Those things were important, but in the end we beat them with Levi 501 jeans. Seventy-two years of communist indoctrination and propaganda was drowned out by a three-ounce Sony Walkman. A huge totalitarian system with all its tanks and guns, gulag camps and secret police had been brought to its knees because nobody wants to wear Bulgarian shoes.
I am beginning to wonder if the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was America’s peak. Nearly all Americans, left and right alike, could agree in 1989 that the American experiment was a righteous project worth defending and advancing. There was near-universal agreement that communism was not only an abject failure but also a great moral evil. The whole world knew that the good guys won the Cold War and that the United States led this global effort. Freedom beat totalitarianism and all Americans were justly proud of this victory.
The writer and satirist finds spiritual fulfilment in his scrapyard animal sculptures
FERRARI REINVENTS MANIFEST DESTINY: P.J. O’Rourke Drives Cross-Country in a Ferrari 308GTS.
When we got to Atlanta, the band in the hotel bar was the worst thing we’d ever heard. But it didn’t matter. Nothing could cloud our outlook. Brock Adams and Joe Califano could have sat down at our table. Ralph Nader himself would have been welcome, so infected were we with the spirit of vast superiority to the humdrum concerns of daily life that the Ferrari confers, or something like that. I mean this car does one thing. It makes you happy, really happy.
And the car did one more thing for me. It reaffirmed my belief in America. It may sound strange to say that a $45,000 Italian sports car reaffirmed my belief in America, but, as I said, it’s all part of Western civilization and here we were in America, the apogee of that fine trend in human affairs.
And, after all, what have we been getting civilized for, all these centuries? Why did we fight all those wars, conquer all those nations, take over all that Western Hemisphere? Why, for this! For this perfection of knowledge and craft. For this conquest of the physical elements. For this sense of mastery of man over nature. To be in control of our destinies—and there is no more profound feeling of control over one’s destiny that I have ever experienced than to drive a Ferrari down a public road at 130 miles an hour. Only God can make a tree, but only man can drive by one that fast. And if the lowly Italians, the lamest, silliest, least stable of our NATO allies, can build a machine like this, just think what it is that we can do. We can smash the atom. We can cure polio. We can fly to the moon if we like. There is nothing we can’t do. Maybe we don’t happen to build Ferraris, but that’s not because there’s anything wrong with America. We just haven’t turned the full light of our intelligence and ability in that direction. We were, you know, busy elsewhere. We may not have Ferraris, but just think what our Polaris-missile submarines are like. And, if it feels like this in a Ferrari at 130, my God, what can it possibly feel like at Mach 2.5 in an F-15? Ferrari 308s and F-15s—these are the conveyances of free men. What do the Bolshevik automatons know of destiny and its control? What have we to fear from the barbarous Red hordes?
RIP. Needless to say, read the whole thing. The ending is a hoot, too:
But the story ends on a sad note. The movie that this incredible car traveled all that way to be in will be called Don’t Eat the Snow from Hawaii, so maybe Western civilization hasn’t quite been perfected yet.
That was the title of the pilot episode for Magnum P.I. — so evidently, O’Rourke drove Magnum’s Ferrari across the country before it was shipped to Hawaii.
MATT LABASH: P.J. O’Rourke, 1947-2022.
It’s a sad fact of American letters that “humorists” – a word I’m almost positive P.J. detested – often get consigned to the children’s table. As though laughing at life keeps one from extracting the marrow from it – a sentiment P.J. regarded as ass-backwards. After all, he was a God guy – and God himself clearly has a bent sense of humor. As P.J. once wrote me: “We acknowledge the Bible as the word of God. And — the one attribute that we absolutely share with our Creator — we have a sense of humor. Right off the bat there’s Genesis 1:27: ‘God created man in his own image.’ And then I look in the mirror.”
But how good a writer was P.J. O’Rourke? Well that’s a hard thing to quantify if you’ve never read him. And I could sit here and play you his greatest hits reel, which would be a daunting challenge, since there are so many hits to choose from. He was a one-man Bartlett’s, if Bartlett’s did funny. P.J. tended to leave at least one chocolate on the pillow in every paragraph. So in showing you how good he is– sorry, was (he’s still so alive to me, I keep forgetting) – I have decided to simplify, and conduct an experiment. As I write this, I have five of his 20 or so books stacked near my keyboard. I am now going to open each one randomly, and relay to you whatever passage I see first.
From 1983’s Modern Manners:
This brings us to a more drastic method of getting an audience: be one. Listen patiently while other people tell you about themselves. Maybe they’ll return the favor. This is risky, however. By the time they get done talking about themselves and are ready to reciprocate, you may be dead from old age. Another danger is that that if you listen long enough you may start attending to what’s being said. You may start thinking about other people, even sympathizing with them. You may develop a true empathy for others, and this will turn you into such a human oddity that you will become a social outcast.
From 1989’s Holidays in Hell:
There were some odd ducks in the audience. They were all milkmaid types with too much hair spray. The men were dark and greasy with Cadillac-fin lapels on their suits and tie knots as big as their ears. “What kind of people go to nightclubs in Poland?” I asked Zofia. “Whores and Arabs,” she said. “What do Poles really do for fun?” “Drink,” said Zofia.
From 1991’s Parliament of Whores:
We had a choice between Democrats who couldn’t learn from the past and Republicans who couldn’t stop living in it, between Democrats who wanted to tax us to death and Republicans who preferred to have us die in a foreign war. The Democrats planned to fiddle while Rome burned. The Republicans were going to burn Rome, then fiddle.
From 1994’s All the Trouble In the World:
Politicians are always searching for some grave alarm which will cause individuals to abandon their separate concerns and prerogatives and act in concert so that politicians can wield the baton. Calls to mortal combat are forever being sounded (though only metaphorically – politicians don’t like real wars, too much merit is involved). The idea is that people will drop everything for a WWIII. Remember the War on Poverty? And how Jimmy Carter asked Americans to respond to a mere rise in the price of crude oil with “the moral equivalent of war”? (What were we supposed to do, shame the gas station attendant to death?)
From 1995’s Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut:
We were on the Big Island, Hawaii proper, the place where migrating Polynesians originally landed more than 1,500 years ago and where Captain Cook died in 1779. Cook was the first haole (a Hawaiian word meaning “person whose luggage is still at the Los Angeles airport”) to visit Hawaii. His crew spread venereal disease through the islands, the Hawaiians beat Captain Cook to death with clubs, and the tourist trade has continued with only minor alterations to the present day.
Again, these aren’t necessarily the Greatest Hits. These are just roll-of-the-dice random passages. Yet I embarked on this experiment fully confident that my eyes wouldn’t land on some weakly-written or boring graf. For one simple reason: P.J. was incapable of writing those. Try the same with any other writer, and see how quickly the experiment fails.