On the menu today: not just a tribute to one of my favorite writers, the departed P. J. O’Rourke, but an observation of why he stood out so uniquely in the media landscape for so long and why the media environment evolved to prevent other idiosyncratic voices from emulating him. Meanwhile, there’s a pro-parent uprising in San Francisco, and a glaring contradiction between U.S. energy policy and U.S. foreign policy.
R.I.P., P. J. O’Rourke
By the standards of the American political culture of 2022, P. J. O’Rourke seems like an impossible figure: a libertarian-conservative writer known first and foremost for being hilarious, who wrote for the biggest and most mainstream publications — Vanity Fair, Playboy, House and Garden, Inquiry, Car and Driver, Men’s Journal, The Atlantic. The New Republic ran excerpts of his speeches. He became the “Foreign Affairs Desk Chief” at Rolling Stone — he wrote that he had that title because “Middle-Aged Drunk” didn’t look good on a business card. He was briefly a commentator on CBS News’s 60 Minutes, and he appeared on The Tonight Show. When the U.S. sent troops to Saudi Arabia in the run-up to the Persian Gulf War, ABC Radio sent him to Saudi Arabia to cover it.
None of those publications or institutions were eager or itching to give valuable space to a conservative writer. None of those publications thought of themselves as conservative or felt much of an obligation to give a conservative voice “equal time.” But O’Rourke was just too darn good to reject — too funny, too insightful, too fair and accurate in the shots he took at the other side, too honest to deny that Republicans often exhibited the same petty, small-minded, self-aggrandizing traits that he disdained in Democrats. He had no pretensions, mocked himself as much as he mocked everyone else, and just about every time he started typing, he nailed this tone of exasperated normalcy, this attitude of witty, snarky, irreverent incredulity with a sharp undertone of “Get out of my face.”
Back in 2010, The Guardian contended that O’Rourke’s position was unique; he had become the right-of-center voice whom left-of-center people enjoyed reading and listening to, even when they disagreed with him:
For many leftwingers PJ O’Rourke occupies a unique position. The famed American humorist and once notoriously hard-living journalist is the Republican that you liked. His caustic wit and warm humanity shone through his writing even when he was attacking your most firmly held political beliefs. Also, he loved a drink and wrote for cool magazines like National Lampoon and Rolling Stone. He seemed like he would be a lot of fun to prop up a bar with.
Perhaps it was O’Rourke’s status as a former long-haired hippie that bought him so much goodwill from the not-so-conservative mainstream, and a de facto hall pass for deviating from the leftist counterculture attitudes of his youth. And wow, did O’Rourke turn against his youthful views. He dedicated Give War a Chance, his 1992 book primarily about the Persian Gulf War, to the man who went to Vietnam because he didn’t. “I hope you got back in one piece, fellow. I hope you were more use to your platoon mates than I would have been. I hope you’re rich and happy now. And in 1971, when somebody punched me in the face for being a long-haired peace creep, I hope that was you.”
There’s regret, there’s deep regret, and then there’s “I’m glad somebody punched me in the face” regret.
Speaking of punching, O’Rourke almost always punched up — unlike some other celebrated satirists of our age. Smug politicians, tin-pot dictators, Saudi royals, celebrities, pretentious corporate CEOs who thought they knew how to reorganize American society — O’Rourke skewered them all. He wrote that Chrysler chief executive Lee Iacocca was “a hero for our time — a conceited big-mouth glad-handing huckster who talked the government into loaning his company piles of money. And Iacocca: An Autobiography is literature for our time. That is, it stinks.”
The Guardian piece mentions that, “Needless to say, he has never been a hit with the family values wing of the Republican party,” and O’Rourke never hid his youthful drug use or running around. You get the feeling he never wanted the likes of Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, or Jimmy Swaggart to start making policy decisions. But if he was a libertine, he was no hypocrite about it, and he rejected everyone else’s simple answers. In a Vanity Fair profile of Dr. Ruth Westheimer, O’Rourke wrote, “Life is not simple, let alone love. Maybe guilt and fear actually increase sexual desire. They did in the backseats of cars when I was younger. Or maybe the very obscurity of sex solders the bond between lovers.”
But for all the cigar-smoking, jokes about hangovers, and reminiscences about sex with easy hippie chicks, O’Rourke seemed quite comfortable when he settled into the pleasures of domestic tranquility and fatherhood. From his 2011 Weekly Standard piece about being an “Irish Setter Dad,” in contrast to the then-trendy talk about “Tiger Moms”:
I just wasn’t cut out to be a Chinese Tiger Mom. I’m more of an Irish Setter Dad. Here are some of the things my daughters, Muffin and Poppet, and my son, Buster, were never allowed to do:
- go to Mass naked
- attend a sleepover at Charlie Sheen’s house
- mix Daddy a martini using sweet vermouth
- play the violin within earshot of me
Have you ever heard a kid learning to play the violin? A cat in the microwave is nothing to it. And let me add an addendum to the things my children were never allowed to do — put a cat in the microwave. I’m not saying it didn’t happen; I’m just saying they weren’t allowed to do it.
And yikes, does O’Rourke’s best work still ring true today. From the introduction to Give War a Chance:
The principal feature of contemporary American liberalism is sanctimoniousness. By loudly denouncing all bad things — war and hunger and date rape — liberals testify to their own terrific goodness. More important, they promote themselves to membership in a self-selecting elite of those who care deeply about such things. People who care a lot are naturally superior to we who don’t care any more than we have to. By virtue of this superiority, the caring have a moral right to lead the nation. It’s a kind of natural aristocracy, and the wonderful thing about this aristocracy is that you don’t have to be brave, smart, strong or even lucky to join it, you just have to be liberal.
Wait, he’s just getting started!
Liberals actually hate wealth because they hate all success. They hate success especially, of course, when it’s achieved by other people, but sometimes they hate the success they achieve themselves. What’s the use of belonging to a self-selecting elite if there’s a real elite around? Liberals don’t like any form of individual achievement. . . . Also wealth is, for most people, the only honest and likely path to liberty. With money comes power over the world. Men are freed from drudgery, women from exploitation. Businesses can be started, homes built, communities formed, religious practiced, educations pursued. But liberals aren’t very interested in such real and material freedoms. Liberals want the freedom to put anything into their mouths, to say bad words, and to expose their private parts in art museums.
Comic exaggeration, sure, but there’s 55-gallon drums of truth in there. You see it in the way that Democratic politicians hate to admit that they’re rich. You see it in the way that progressives fume about the “semi-rich,” the “upper-middle class,” “the 9.9 percent,” and “status-income disequilibrium” — when a progressive has a high social status but a modest income. Progressives want to live the Bernie Sanders dream — spend your whole life working in government, never compromise your principles, and end up as a socialist with a net worth of $3 million, owning three houses.
The passage of P. J. O’Rourke is a grim reminder of how much our culture has changed from when he burst upon the scene in the 1970s, and of the cultural waters he thrived in until very recently. The urge to “cancel” those deemed controversial by the Left means that what little “irreverence” remains picks on only familiar, tired targets — Donald Trump, hicks, boring middle-class white people, bumbling suburban dads, Christians. The room for dissent can now be measured in microns; Joe Rogan is a pot-smoking Bernie Sanders voter who calls Christianity mythology, and somehow, he’s become the modern Left’s Public Enemy No. 1.
O’Rourke has no natural or obvious successor — and while a huge part of that is because he was immensely talented, another reason is that vast swaths of mainstream-media culture don’t want another O’Rourke — an extremely likable, sharp-minded guy who reminds the audience that those conservatives have a point. I ran across an essay which argued that O’Rourke’s mockery of the Left never changed anything and never did any real harm to leftist causes. But if O’Rourke’s ridicule was really so harmless to modern progressivism . . . why did voices such as his disappear from mainstream institutions?
Chris Cuomo, Longtime Creep
The New York Times fills in a few blanks on the departure of Jeff Zucker from CNN — namely, that a woman “who had worked with [anchor Chris] Cuomo years earlier at ABC News . . . said he had sexually assaulted her and that, in the heat of the #MeToo movement, Mr. Cuomo had tried to keep her quiet by arranging a flattering CNN segment about her employer at the time.”
The Pro-Parent Uprising in . . . San Francisco?
How potent is the issue of keeping schools open? Potent enough to get three school-board members recalled in the middle of February:
The recall movement first gained steam more than a year ago as San Francisco Unified School District students remained stuck in distance learning, even when state and county officials gave the green light to reopen and while other public education systems were returning to in-person instruction. Calls grew more intense for the removal of the eligible board members when the board prioritized, while schools were still closed, the renaming of 44 campuses — whose names, such as Abraham Lincoln and Dianne Feinstein, it said, honored figures linked to racism and sexism.
Got that, Woke Left and teachers’ unions? Parents aren’t buying what you’re selling in San Francisco. Good luck in all those purple congressional districts and states this November!
ADDENDUM: For a country that wants to stand up to Vladimir Putin and Russia . . . we sure do import a lot of Russian oil, don’t we?