P.J. O'Rourke, RIP
O'Rourke, who has died of lung cancer, was a great journalist with an entertaining libertarian spin who wrote with humor about big ideas and small. Nice guy, too.
In 1985, when I was a lowly copy editor at the Los Angeles Times, I “discovered” a wise-ass young writer named P.J. O’Rourke in Harper’s magazine and commissioned him to write a brief piece for the Sunday Calendar section about his thoughts on Disneyland.
He had never actually been to Disneyland, but it didn’t matter. We wanted him to write for us and we paid him $500.
Later I interviewed him in 2004 for the Pittsburgh Tribune Review in advance of a lecture appearance and again in 2007 about his book ‘On the Wealth of Nations.’ Still later, I got him to plug my self-published O’Rourkian-styled ‘true nonfiction’ book ‘Dogging Steinbeck.’
He was always a nice and friendly guy on the phone from his home in new Hampshire — and deeply appreciative of his chance to write for the LA Times. He once told me it was the easiest $500 he ever made in journalism.
Satire with a spin — P.J. O’Rourke
Pittsburgh Trib
September 2004
Humorist P.J. O'Rourke passes himself off as a Wall Street Journal-certified funny guy, best-selling book author and excellent magazine journalist who satirizes the idiocies he finds in Washington, D.C., international politics and bachelorhood.
But anyone who's followed his writings in Rolling Stone or read any of his books -- "Peace Kills" and "Parliament of Whores" come to mind -- knows he's really a clever propagandist for the libertarian-conservative cause.
O'Rourke, 56, once editor of National Lampoon, opens the 2004-2005 Drue Heinz Lectures series 7:30 p.m. Monday at the Carnegie Music Hall in Oakland. I talked to him Wednesday from his home in New Hampshire.
Here’s the full audio, followed by what we printed in the paper.
Q: Do you plan to drop in on Teresa Heinz Kerry while you’re in town?
A: No. We’re Hunt’s ketchup people. We didn’t used to be. Frankly, it’s inferior ketchup. But whatever it takes to make America strong, we’re willing to make the sacrifice.
A: Not at all. I was a very serious young college student, as only a young college student can be. I had it in mind to write incomprehensible poetry that didn’t rime and novels that were lots longer and much more difficult to read than “Finnegan’s Wake.” But I found I just didn’t have the knack for it.
Q: A review of one of your books on Amazon.com said – and I don’t know if this is a compliment or not, you tell me -- that “you’re less bitter than Ann Coulter but funnier than Al Franken.”
A: (laughs) I think that’s fair. I’ll take that as a compliment. I don’t know how bitter Ann actually is. I don’t really know her. But she’s scary, I know that. I’m definitely less scary. I’m shorter too, I think. But I’m taller than Al Franken.
Q: That’s right. So you are somewhere in the middle.
A: Yeah.
Q: You – I think you know this – combine humor, satire and sarcasm with a very specific political/ideological and, dare I say, philosophical message or point of view. What is that?
A: To put a single word on that, it would be “libertarian.” I am a libertarian conservative. Or as we libertarian conservatives like to say, a classic 18th century liberal. Now that everybody’s thoroughly confused (laughs) ….
But it’s just, from a political and I suppose philosophical point of view, that the ultimate good is human liberty and the concomitant responsibility that goes with that liberty. And that’s what we measure everything against: Does this increase human liberty and responsibility, or not?
Q: I’m a longtime libertarian, so I know the difference between a classical liberal and a John Kerry liberal, for instance.
A: Yeah, about 180 degrees.
Q: Right. Are you deliberately trying to proselytize and persuade in your writings?
Are you trying to speak to the un-persuaded?
A: Definitely. Definitely. But of course it depends on what I’m doing. A lot of the time I’m just being a reporter, so my job is just to tell people what things are like – how many people died in the car crash. So I’m not proselytizing then. But when I do something like a book like “Eat the Rich” or “Parliament of Whores” or “All the Trouble in the World,” definitely I am.
Q: In 1993 you gave a little talk at the Cato Institute when dedicated their new HQs called “The Liberty Manifesto.” Can you summarize it?
A: Yeah, mind your own business. Keep you hands to yourself. That was the message. And I think at that specific time, it was, “Mind your own business Hillary and Bill, keep your hands to yourself.”
Q: What do you think of President Bush and will you vote for him?
A: Yes, I will vote for him. I am aggravated with him. I’ve got a whole long list: I hate the faith-based initiatives. I hate the No Child Left Behind. I hate the deficit spending. I hate the fact that he hasn’t even attempted to cut back on government spending.
From my point of view, government spending is the key issue, not deficits or taxes.
Milton Friedman pointed out some years ago that when the government spends, it will figure out a way to finance its spending, whether by taxes, by deficit borrowing or debasing the currency.
The real key is how much of a nation’s economy, and hence of people’s material freedoms, the government allocates to itself. That’s a separate question whether certain social programs should exist or not. But just as a quantitative thing, if a third of the economy is directed by or under the aegis of some level of government in the United States, that means a third or everyone’s material freedoms.
And that’s not good. I just spoke with a group of Cato people at a conference in Vermont and I said, about Bush, that “conservatives are not our friends, but liberals are our enemies.”
Q: Is there anything you can say nice about Mr. Kerry, who apparently has decided he’s going to run as an anti-war candidate after all?
A: Yeah. Well, “consistency” wouldn’t be the word that leapt to mind. I think he’s an honest-enough fellow. I don’t think there’s any reason for him to be president, and I don’t think he has one.
If it were Gephardt, there would lots to talk about. He’d be a worthy opponent. Kerry, I don’t know. Just to take Iraq, as an example, here’s something from my speech: What does Kerry propose to do, give Saddam Hussein a mulligan and let him take his tee shot over? No.
Q: Are you a dove or a chicken hawk on Iraq?
A: Chicken hawk (laughs)… a proud chicken hawk. I was in Kuwait. I covered the first Gulf War. I saw what the Iraqis did to Kuwait, so I was very much in favor of finishing the job. These are bad people – not all the Iraqis, but the Baath Party and Saddam Hussein.
Q: On foreign policy, I’ve always tried to figure out if you were a quote-unquote “real” libertarian. I’ve come from being a William F. Buckley Cold War warrior to where I’m now basically a perfect Pat Buchanan anti-imperialist. Where are you on that?
A: I’m pretty hawkish. I guess that’s where I kind of come apart with at least some of the people at the Cato Institute. They and I just don’t agree about this. I just think it’s a big, bad world out there. Evil is an outreach program and we’ve got to do something about it. I wish it were otherwise, but I don’t think there is a way around it. These people are after our butt.
Q: Do you still think going to Iraq was a good move?
A: I don’t want to Monday-morning-quarterback the thing. I always thought Bush should have come after it was clear there weren’t any WMDs and say, “Look, Saddam Hussein didn’t have any weapons of mass destruction. How crazy does that make him?!” I’m not sure this tactically was the right thing to do.
I think this was a battle that was going to have to be fought. Should it have been fought right when it was, I don’t know. I’m glad I didn’t have to make the decision. It is evident that the administration was a little short on Plan B, in case things didn’t work out. That much, they’re obviously open to criticism.
Q: Do you do predictions on the election?
A: Not I. Not I. Although I gotta say I’m a less worried than I was a couple months ago, but I’m still worried. I really don’t know how this is going to go.
Q: Do you have any sense that our generation is getting smarter about politics or economics or the role of government?
A: Yeah, but not as much as we should. Yes. It’s only to be expected that as we got older and acquired more responsibilities that we would wiser. The other thing, we were starting from a very low baseline.
We hardly could have become more foolish than we were 40 years ago. So yes, we’re definitely getting smarter. Are we getting smart enough? MMMMMM, I don’t know.
Actually I think our generation is a little wiser -- if only in the sense of being more cynical -- about politics than our parents were. Our parents were dim as shit about this stuff.
The New Deal and the war really warped their sensibility about stuff. And even the ones who vote on the right side – I mean, you don’t want to talk about their theoretical underpinnings for these things. Often it turns out that they’ve made the right decision for a very wrong reason – like that they hate black people or something. It’s usually not good.
Q: You will be speaking to an audience – and I’m sure you’ve done this before – of urban liberals who probably won’t like much of what you’re going to tell them about freedom, government, Republicans. How are you going to shock them?
A: Well, it’s not a matter of shocking them. My idea of a balanced approach is to show them that I am fully aware of the shortcomings of the side that I am allegedly on.
The thing I always try to get at with people is that the political process is just not a good way to make decisions – that you don’t have to make it that way.
Now some decisions just have to be made by means of the political process. There’s no way around it. There may be a better way to do it, but it ain't been invented.
Technical expertise. Hayek was very good on that. This again is something from my speech – Hayek said imagine a world where the leading expert in each field has complete control over that field. Ooohhh.
Q: So you are going to actually speak the name “Hayek in the presence of these people. They’ve never heard it before, I guarantee it.
A: They probably haven’t, but yeah, I definitely – to try not just to be funny about my views but to try to give them a little idea of why I feel the way I do. Why political decisions in our lives should be limited. We can’t get rid of them completely, but they definitely should be limited.
Q&A with P.J. O’Rourke
Adam Smith for Dummies
Pittsburgh Trib, 2007
"On The Wealth of Nations" by P.J. O'Rourke (Atlantic Monthly Press)
Adam Smith’s seminal 1776 masterpiece explaining the magical workings of free markets is riddled with economic and social truths that still hold up today.
But trying to read "The Wealth of Nations’ " 900 dense pages is an endurance test for even the most serious modern reader – or prison lifer, for that matter.
Atlantic Monthly Press has solved that problem by hiring satirist P.J. O’Rourke to dig into Smith’s opus and tell the rest of us what it’s about.
O’Rourke’s wit, journalism skills and economics acumen make him a good choice for Atlantic’s new series of "Books That Changed the World," which kicks off Jan. 10 with the publication of his lively exegesis "On The Wealth of Nations."
I recently talked to O’Rourke by phone from Washington, D.C.
Q: What’s the sound-bite synopsis of Adam Smith’s epic?
A: Well, that it’s really about freedom and morality and not actually about economics is really the one sentence summary. So when one is sent to read it as an economics thing, it’s like, "Dude, this is like 200-and-some years old. What did he know? He didn’t have an iPod…." But his book is really about why we put up with a free market.
Q: You actually read "The Wealth of Nations" and its predecessor, "A Theory of Moral Sentiments." But let’s stick to "Wealth of Nations." Does it hold up?
A: No let’s go back one book, because "The Theory of Moral Sentiments," being somewhat more abstract, holds up brilliantly. I mean, there’s not a word wrong with that thing today.
You can read that today with the same number of "ah-ha" moments, because it’s about the fundamentals of human nature. It’s a brilliant work of ethics and psychology and philosophy, but not the kind of philosophy you have to use numbers to understand.
It’s a damn good book. It’s a sort of self-help book, too. Clean up the language – you could hit the best-seller list with this one. I probably wrote about the wrong book.
The "Wealth of Nations," of course, is fighting some battles like the intellectual battle about whether gold and silver have intrinsic value, as opposed to notional value, that are long-gone stuff. So there are sections of "Wealth of Nations" that are moot – though it’s not that they don’t hold up.
Q: Is there any single most enduring truth from "The Wealth of Nations"?
A: Oh, totally. When Smith starts out right at the beginning about how you have to allow for the human desire for self-betterment or self-interest. And how you have to have freedom of exchange between people.
That is so fundamental, not only to making an economy work right, but just to any decent democracy or society. Yeah, it blows you away how clearly he puts this.
Q: I’ve tried to read "The Wealth of Nations."
A: It’s a slog, there’s no doubt about it. I don’t really recommend it.
Q: But you can find chunks of it and quotes from it referred to by other famous people. It’s like, "Who needs Hayek? Adam Smith said everything back in 1776, just in different words." It seems like everyone has stolen from Smith – who apparently stole from others before him too, right?
A: Oh, definitely. He owes a huge debt and he makes no claim for tremendous originality. Friedrich Hayek would be the first to tell you that. If Hayek were around, and you said that to Hayek, he would agree completely. As would Milton Friedman.
Not about certain academic work that Friedman did -- and ditto for Hayek. These guys did all sorts of stuff we don’t understand – about price curves, Phillips Curves, Phillips screw drivers and heavens knows what.
But as far their stuff that any of us understand – "The Road to Serfdom" or "The Free to Be You and Me" or whatever, they would be the first to say, "Yes, we see so far. But we’re not even midgets standing on somebody’s shoulders. We’re head lice looking out from Adam Smith’s wig."
Q: Who should be forced to read the original today – which politicians or East Coast editorial boards?
A: All of them. All of them. Right, left and middle of the road. It’d be easy for me to pick on the leftists, particularly about protectionism. But any understanding of the fundamental philosophical and moral and ethical groundwork beneath free markets seems to be just absent.
The world these days has a Clintonian view. It’s not that they disagree with market freedoms, but they regard it as teleological – as a means to an end. "Why do we want free markets? Because they make ordinary people more prosperous." That isn’t the point. The point is, either we are free and equal or we are not.
Q: Is there anything Smith wrote that you think he would be ashamed of today?
A: Well, not ashamed of, but there is stuff he is wrong about. Especially when he gets into specific policy recommendations. Essentially the whole last book of "The Wealth of Nations" is nuts-and-bolts policy recommendations. He is self-contradictory in there. He is often wrong.
It shows the problem that no matter how good your ethical and moral foundations may be, when it comes to making those recommendations on the sewer board about whether or not to build a new aeration plant, they are viciously tricky.
No amount of brilliance as an economist, a philosopher, a moralist, an ethicist or prose stylist necessarily grants you the right view. At the moment that he wrote this book, you could have taken him to task for some of his stuff and he probably would have agreed.
Q: Is there anything Smith wrote about that you completely disagree with?
A: Well, as I say, there are specific policy recommendations about taxation and education. He’s very confusing about state support in terms of religion. But it would be tactical disagreements rather than strategic – it’d be detail stuff. But no, there is no whole side of his thinking that gives one pause.
It’s not like Hume. Hume is this incredibly admirable and sensible man, but he insists that he is an atheist. Smith doubted him a bit on this – they were great friends. But Hume maintained that he was an atheist and so you go, "No. I just can’t agree with that." But there’s nothing like that in Smith, who is, incidentally, very coy about his religious ideas.
Q: Is there anything funny in "The Wealth of Nations"?
A: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Smith has a kind of dry, slightly academic sense of humor. But there is this wonderful passage about refuting the idea that we should always try to get more gold and silver and always try to export consumable properties so as to increase our hoard of gold and silver, which is our real measure of wealth.
He said, you know, you could say the same thing about pots and pans. They are real durable too. So why don’t we manufacture and keep more pots and pans? Yeah, he can be quite funny and quite cutting.
A pull quote from O’Rourke’s book:
O’ROURKE ON SMITH
"Unfortunately, Adam Smith didn’t have graphs. Hundreds of pages of The Wealth of Nations that readers skim might have been condensed into several pages that readers skip entirely. Another thing Smith didn’t have, besides graphs, was jargon. Economics was too new to have developed its thieves’ cant. When Adam Smith was being incomprehensible he didn’t have the luxury of brief, snappy technical terms as a shorthand for incoherence. He had to go on talking through his hat until the subject was (and the reader would be) exhausted."
The synopsis of ‘On the Wealth of Nations’ at Amazon was no doubt written by O’Rourke:
In ‘On the Wealth of Nations,’ America’s most provocative satirist, P. J. O’Rourke, reads Adam Smith’s revolutionary ‘The Wealth of Nations’ so you don’t have to.
Recognized almost instantly on its publication in 1776 as the fundamental work of economics, ‘The Wealth of Nations’ was also recognized as really long: the original edition totaled over nine hundred pages in two volumes—including the blockbuster sixty-seven-page “digression concerning the variations in the value of silver during the course of the last four centuries,” which, “to those uninterested in the historiography of currency supply, is like reading Modern Maturity in Urdu.”
Although daunting, Smith’s tome is still essential to understanding such current hot-topics as outsourcing, trade imbalances, and Angelina Jolie. In this hilarious, approachable, and insightful examination of Smith and his groundbreaking work, P. J. puts his trademark wit to good use, and shows us why Smith is still relevant, why what seems obvious now was once revolutionary, and why the pursuit of self-interest is so important.
PUBERTY BLUES AND OUTGROWING URGES
A political satirist who probably has no business writing about Disneyland, nevertheless has something to say. . . .
Los Angles Times, 1985
P.J. O'ROURKE
I've never been to Disneyland. In fact, I've never even been able to make up my mind if I wanted to go.
I remember when Walt opened the place. It caused quite a stir among my fellow 7-year-olds in Toledo, Ohio. Toledo didn't offer much beyond the annual county fair — mostly an exhibit of overweight farm animals. To a small child in Ohio, Disneyland looked like Gomorrah, V-J Day and Paris in the '20s rolled into one.
There was a great outbreak of mewling and puling at parents to take us there. But in my heart I dreaded it. I was scared of grown-ups walking around in giant mouse heads. Grown-ups were, I felt, stability incarnate, and I didn't like it one bit when they got wacky. Since infancy I'd harbored a terror of nuns, clowns and other strange adults (and still do, especially the one I see in the mirror every morning ).
By 1960 I'd overcome this secret shame and really did want to go to Disneyland. The rides and all were still appealing, but the real attraction was California, that Disneyterre Magnum in which Disneyland itself was located. Beaches, hot rods, girls in two-piece bathing suits — California had not only Futureland, it had the actual future. Even at 12 I knew Ohio didn't.
Five years later I'd outgrown any thought of Disney. I wanted to go to Greenwich Village, listen to beatnik poetry recitals, smoke cigarettes and play bongo drums. Disneyland was kid's stuff.
Five years after that, when I'd actually been to Greenwich Village and had listened to all the beatnik poetry recitals one man can stand, I once more desperately wanted to visit the wonderful world of color. I intended to take LSD or some other noxious drug and "flip out on Amerika" (as we then spelled it). It's a good thing I didn't get to Disneyland. I was looking (and acting) like a loon in those days. Cleverly animated policemen would have grabbed me, no doubt, and thrown me into mouse prison.
When I'd come to my senses again, in 1975, Disneyland was an anathema, bourgeois taste at its worst. Boring people standing in boring lines to see plaster and polyethylene imitations of the stupid world they lived in any way — quelle drag.
But, by 1980, I was getting sentimental. The very mention of Disneyland made my eyes mist with nostalgia for innocent pleasures of an innocent time. Disneyland seemed sweet and quaint to me. And one day, when I was driving from a peevish business meeting in Orange County to a dreadful appointment at a Los Angeles movie studio, I almost stopped at the Magic Kingdom.
But I was late, and I didn't, and now I probably never will. As middle age approaches, one realizes how few things set us apart from our fellows. I have no honors or distinctions to speak of. I'm not rich, famous or powerful. But I am the only person I've ever met who absolutely doesn't have any opinion one way or the other about Disneyland.
******
In 1991, I favorably but fairly reviewed ‘Parliament of Whores’ for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
O'Rourke spares no one in ‘Parliament of Whores’
P.J. O'Rourke, political pundit for Rolling Stone and other magazines, has produced this summer's surprise nonfiction bestseller, "Parliament of Whores," No. 1 on the Publisher's Weekly list.
"PARLIAMENT OF WHORES" by P. J. O'Rourke.
Aug. 12, 1991
Bill Steigerwald
If only all Republicans were like P.J. O'Rourke, the wise-guy journalist whose government-trashing anthology "Parliament of Whores" is one of this summer's bestsellers.
As his entertaining, informative and fun-filled book proves on every page, O'Rourke is arguably mainstream journalism's cleverest and most politically incorrect humorist.
He is funny, flip, sarcastic, rude, irreverent, perceptive, a little nasty, bright and talented — especially for a guy who grew up in Toledo.
The ex-National Lampoon magazine staffer is an admitted booze-hound and unrepentant former pot smoker who knows America has a time-honored "tradition of getting hysterical over dope."
At 43, he's hip enough to write regularly for the yuppified but still politically liberal Rolling Stone.
Yet he's proud to be a conservative Republican. He's a card-carrying GOP groupie with a healthy libertarian streak who never tires of ridiculing liberals and cracking wise.
O'Rourke is sneaky. Though he fires most of his best ammo at what he considers wacko environmentalists, the homeless lobby and other members of what he calls "the Perennially Indignant," he always remembers to aim a few shots at Republicans.
When it comes to politicians, he's a bipartisan basher.
"Both Democrats and Republicans are guilty of mindless sports-fan behavior, rat-gagging gluttony for political office and ideology without ideas," he sputters in "On the Blandwagon," his chapter on political conventions.
He goes on:
"Democrats are also the party of government activism, the party that says government can make you richer, smarter, taller and get the chickweed out of your lawn. Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work, and then they get elected and prove it."
"Parliament of Whores," which bears the disingenuous subtitle "A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government," is mostly an anthology of retooled articles that O'Rourke first wrote for Rolling Stone, Automobile and American Spectator magazines.
O'Rourke's nonstop cleverness is best taken in small doses.
But whether he's on a vigilante drug-buster raid with Curtis Sliwa and his Guardian Angels in the South Bronx or hanging out in a bar in Pakistan on the Afghanistan border, he mixes good reporting with lots of laughs.
He also tosses in a dozen or so F-words and assorted other crudities sure to offend at least half of America's registered Republicans.
But O'Rourke's greatest talent is his ability to write entertainingly about any subject, no matter how inherently boring or complex. Whether he's explaining the S&L crisis, the farm fiasco, the housing mess or merely covering a town meeting somewhere in New Hampshire, his humor shines on every page.
For someone who says he has come to the arch-libertarian conclusion that "government is morally wrong," however, he has a unfortunate case of high-tech weapons lust and he is embarrassingly soft on the Defense Department.
But unlike so many Republicans who have lost their faith and fallen deeply in love with the power and perks of big government, O'Rourke is faithful to his anti-authoritarian impulses. His distrust and distaste for government in any form permeate nearly every chapter of his delightfully mean-spirited and subversive book.