My generation’s funniest, most incisive and irreverent writer, a true lover of American liberty and the good life, P. J. O’Rourke has reportedly passed away.
I call him P. J. as if I knew him personally, when in all probability he had no recollection of who I was. Back in the mid 2000s, I had my one chance to meet P. J. at an event put on by the Independence Institute in Colorado. By this time, I’d been fortunate enough to interview numerous distinguished people — legendary athletes, governors, presidential candidates, and so on. Not once had I felt much apprehension about speaking to anyone. Yet it took a few drinks to muster the nerve to approach P. J. (though, in fairness, a couple fewer than he’d probably imbibed). I opened with: “It’s a pleasure to meet you, though I feel like I already know you since I’ve been ripping you off for years.” God, what an idiotic thing to say. P. J. was kind enough to laugh, and then proceeded to be as charming and funny as his writing.
What I didn’t bring up during our conversation was that he had only recently turned me down for a book blurb via email, explaining:
This has nothing to do with high standards of personal integrity. It’s just that I live in fear that I’ll lavish praise upon a work that somewhere, deep in its unread-by-me manuscript, claims that Pope John Paul II headed the conspiracy to murder Natalie Wood — or some such.
A personal note was better than any blurb.
I hope to write more about P. J.’s prolific career, which began with underground magazines and then National Lampoon, before really making his name at Rolling Stone. How many unsuspecting Bruce Springsteen fans had been spared a life of braindead liberalism by his foreign dispatches and mockery of left-wing pieties? People say that he was our Mencken, but P. J. was no angry crank. He could find humor in virtually anything. So many contemporary conservative and libertarian writers have aspired to be like him — whether they admitted it or not. None ever came close.