P. J. O'Rourke, 1947-2022
mattlabash.substack.com
mattlabash.substack.com
Not sure there is any comparable figure today that comes to mind.
Last week I enjoyed listening to a rebroadcast of his appearance on James Altucher's podcast: https://jamesaltucher.com/podcast/pj-orourke/
> I have a little announcement to make. I mean my whole purpose in life basically is to offend everyone who listens to NPR. No matter what position they take on anything like I'm on the other side of it you know.
> I'm voting for Hillary.
> I am endorsing Hillary and all her lies and all her empty promises. I am endorsing Hillary. The second worse thing that could happen to this country, but it's she's way behind in second place you know.
> I mean she's wrong about absolutely everything but she's wrong within normal parameters.
the news article: https://www.npr.org/2016/05/09/477339063/conservative-author...
the episode: https://www.npr.org/2016/05/07/477085149/whos-bill-this-time - its about 3 minutes in.
I don’t know why but I just love that line. It really captures a mood/mentality from that moment.
And this endorsement is coming from a latte' sipping out-of-touch east coast liberal.
edit: you can find the full bit here: http://www.paulburns.com/Quotes/pj.shtml
By showing us that it is all lies by lying about literally everything, we will become wiser? By demonstrating that our democracy is weak by attempting to topple it, we will become stronger?
It sounds like some kind of Tough Love dream. I don't care for it, though, I think draining the swamp is an admirable idea so long as filling it back up with the sewer isn't the second part of that plan. I'm not convinced the path to a better country requires that we destroy it first.
Which I now realize is a bit ironic, considering who I learned it from.
On the flip side, you have the young who are optimistic enough to think that things will only get better because so many people are hoping to make things better, and with that backing how could it get worse?
This progression might be greater or lesser in some people, or even go in reverse. Regardless, I suspect somewhere in the middle of this is where we usually should be. Where people want change but are cautious because they've seen good intentions backfire and movements be subverted, but also when they haven't become so jaded as to not want change for the sake of not having to deal with it anymore, even when it's important issues that help a lot of people.
That I view myself at where I describe as a good spot in this progression is probably informed by a non-negligible amount of subconscious bias on my part.
Or do you just not see the actual danger here and think Trump was a fairly decent guy who's just a bad/corrupt real estate huckster as opposed to a sociopathic grifter?
Pretty sure 100's of thousands of people wouldn't have died.
Pretty sure she would have sanctioned Russia a lot harder, to try to, oh, dissuade them from invading Ukraine.
On that second point, Clinton absolutely would have made a difference, because we know that the administration was aware of the pandemic well before the cases started spiking in New York, and we know [1] that Trump autonomously decided not to publicly release that information or tell the CDC to prepare for a major epidemic. That was a major, avoidable mistake. I doubt it would have prevented 100k deaths; rather somewhere in the range of 10k-50k.
Also, Trump really energized vaccine denialists; he was already catering to them in 2016 [2], and a loss in 2016 would likely have significantly reduced his audience on this point. It's not clear how many more people would have gotten vaccinated in a world where Clinton won in 2016, but it might be significant. Densely urbanized blue states led in deaths per capita before the vaccine came out, but now only New York and New Jersey are in the top 10, and my state of Rhode Island dropped from 4th-most DPC to 18th [3] -- I don't recall there being a strong correlation between Republicans and vaccine denialism before Trump, and in fact, the correlation may have reversed since 2011 [4].
1: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-told-bob...
2: https://www.historyofvaccines.org/trump-and-vaccines
3: https://worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us
4: https://reason.com/2011/10/04/more-anti-science-democrats-or...
This was 100% attributable to Dr. Cameron Kyle-Sidell's rebellion video to youtube, where he called out the academic doctors for giving doctors like him the terrible advice to ventilate SARS-CoV-2 patients as the best treatment.
Dr. Kyle-Sidell's journal letter discussed his observation of hypocapnic hypoxia. This would've been easy to treat, if Medicine hadn't forgotten about #OxygenToxicity.
That’s a new word for me, does it carry any specific connotation?
Nowadays it mostly refers to “A person who attacks cherished beliefs or institutions”. [1]
It connotes that someone isn’t afraid to loudly voice a (potentially) minority or unpopular opinion. See also ‘shit-stirrer’, ‘skeptic’.
It’s also in the title of a classic Simpsons episode. [2]
In O'Rourke's case it meant that while saying that he was a republican and having a go at cyclists and fat women and other "safe" targets, he was also happy to rip into Reagan for supporting Marcos against the peaceful Yellow Revolution, or his seminal essay on the war on drugs, "The Whiffle Ball Life", where he pointed out that the people selling the war could always be sure that they or their kids would never suffer any serious consequence for their own drug use, but that it would be borne by black teens and young men.
I agree this is how he was classified on the modern spectrum but I think he was really a classic liberal, a pre-Peter Thiel libertarian without all the distracting noise. He's a hard person to fit cleanly into any single bucket, which is a good thing that isn't received well in our current binary environment.
"There is only one basic human right: the right to do as you please, without causing others harm. With it comes our only basic human duty: the duty to accept the consequences of our actions."
We're pretty good at the former, and almost universally ignore the latter.
But I believe you're wrong about his view on that anyway.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhTge9k1gmQ
And pro-gay rights:
> I'm so conservative that I approve of San Francisco City Hall marriages, adoption by same-sex couples, and New Hampshire's recently ordained Episcopal bishop. Gays want to get married, have children, and go to church. Next they'll be advocating school vouchers, boycotting HBO, and voting Republican.
— "I Agree With Me" (July/August 2004)
Are you sure you're referring to the same P.J. O'Rourke?
On the other hand, inventing the term "Republican Party Reptile" probably makes you a Republican. Because, like, you know.
The obit already mentioned the late great Christopher Hitchens.
In his (frequent) funnier moments, I think Scott Alexander channels the same daemon.
There isn't.
Every single one of that breed is gone (from the conservative to the liberal, because there is no replacement for Molly Ivins either). The closest we have are a few UK public intellectuals/satirists (e.g. Stephen Fry, Ian Hislop) but even they aren't quite the same animal. There are writers of a certain quality that are massively entertaining and brilliant, like Cintra Wilson (Her book on the national Fame-virus epidemic, "A Massive Swelling" is essential), but her focus isn't just on political satire, so it's still not quite the same.
* I also revered Twain and Mencken, but PJ/HST/MI were contemporaries and in my time, which carried a more visceral stamp to them.
I think it's the opposite actually. I think 'satirists' now are expected to be so extreme that the only think people think is funny is "the other side is composed of dribbling morons". Humor that suggests that the people with different political views may have feelings and brains is completely unacceptable.
They simply wouldn't buy into the idea that people from "the past" would have different views and that you can't try to understand them absent that context. Otherwise everything since before 2005 is likely "wrong" somehow (I'm being horribly simplistic, but you get the idea).
It's like when I hear a lot of views right now about the CIS region, from people who have no recollection of the Cold War, or think the Cold War "was stupid". As someone who lived through the Cold War, I might even agree it was stupid, but I also understand that when I was 10-15 I was living IN it realtime, not pondering it decades after the fact.
Do a web search for O'Rourke's "Foreigners around the world" and report back.
> Humor that suggests that the people with different political views may have feelings and brains is completely unacceptable.
I think this may be a case of politically polarization widening as the range of allowable humor narrows. What would be an example of a joke that would have been career ending for an edgy American comedian or satirist 40 years ago, but not now?
http://cbldf.org/about-us/case-files/obscenity-case-files/pe...
The SNL sketch between Richard Pryor and Chevy Chase is emblematic.
Two quick examples are thestranger.com (under the leadership of editor Dan Savage) and Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Whatever point, perhaps even meritorious, they're trying make, it's buried under sarcasm and insults.
Absolutely exhausting.
Maybe this cycle started with TV. All the slapfights. Gore Vidal v William F. Buckley Jr. Shows like Crossfire.
He was terse, and spoke things out loud about the American subconscious that was often uncomfortable (much like Mencken) across the political spectrum. To plagiarize a BBC article: PJ O'Rourke memorably said that the American public viewed the Bosnian war as pitting the "unspellables" against the "unpronounceables".
You can view that as heartless detachment, or you can see it as an unvarnished observation of the total disconnect the American people had with what happened in the Balkans at the time. I suspect PJ left those kinds of statements open-ended for the exact purpose of having to make people think about them...were they capable of mustering the electricity between the ears (knowing that some likely wouldn't).
Enjoyed by both liberals and conservatives who managed to take away very different messages.
“Our big and sloppy political system keeps America away from abstract political theorists. Away from abstract political theory is a good place to be. Our compromised and compromising system with its messey conflicts and fitful bipartisanship keeps governments close to real life. Because in reality we all contain within ourselves elements of the democrat and republican. We are conservatives when we catch the kids smoking pot and we are quite liberal when we catch ourselves doing it. No one ever says oh goodie when its time to pay the taxes and no one ever turns down a government benefit. Abondining the two party system would mean abondining a great truth. The truth that we are all of two minds about politics Greater certainity in our political system would mean more politics, more arguments, more strife we dont need that we got enough...”
at 1h29m in transcript
Other countries are not stuck with our system. We are stuck with it, but that is not a reason to come to like it. We have to find ways to work around being stuck with it. Pretending it is OK actively interferes with that.
Most parliamentary systems, or multi-party systems, do not have the same amounts of longstanding political polarization that has come to grip America, where every issue must be divided along party lines or you're a "traitor to the cause".
The weird thing is that people refer to the period of the overlapping post-WWII realignments, and the associated misalignment of the divide between the major parties with the major ideological divides, as being “pre-polarization”, since it was a time of intense political polarization, characterized by the period of the some of the most intense and violent sustained internal political conflict in the country after the Civil War (the overlapping Race/Civil Rights, Anti-War, and some overlapping less conflicts of the 50s-70s), where the polarizing issues just didn't cleanly align with the divide between the major parties.
Intense political polarization isn't new. What is new (or, rather, has returned to it's historical norm after an unusually long break) is the partisan divide actually aligning with the main salient ideological divides around which the polarization occurs, as the period of realignment settled out around the early-to-mid-1990s.
So now we have "conservatives" identifying with Russians and against election regularity, and "liberals" identifying with the FBI and government mandates and against free speech and inquiry.
No, the ideological divide had basically settled out by the 1980s, and the parties sorted out to match by the mid-1990s.
[1] Fortunately I was able to find the exact quote on Google
His intro to "Republican Party Reptile" more or less said (this is from memory) that his politics fit more into the Republican mold, but that he wasn't particularly happy about that, because he also liked having fun. It's hard to cubbyhole P.J., and he preferred it that way.
He had a way of turning a phrase that made you go, "yeah, I wish I came up with that." I have to viciously edit anything I write because if I'm not paying attention I will blithely rip off something of his without thinking about it.
Hopefully it'll get better.
Part of me feels fairly uncomfortable with this idea. Humor is such a complicated emotion, but lately we seem to try to distill it to a single interpretation, shallow, derisive, and then proclaim what it's okay to laugh about or not.
The most memorable chapter for me in "Parliament of Whores" was Moscow on the Mississippi which, much like Whiffle Ball Life from "Holidays" was a great example of his willingness to turn his guns at the people who shared his party but not his ideals.
JournalismJobs.com: Why have conservative media outlets like The Weekly Standard and Fox News Channel become more popular in the past few years?
Matt Labash: Because they feed the rage. We bring the pain to the liberal media. I say that mockingly, but it's true somewhat. We come with a strong point of view and people like point of view journalism. While all these hand-wringing Freedom Forum types talk about objectivity, the conservative media likes to rap the liberal media on the knuckles for not being objective. We've created this cottage industry in which it pays to be un-objective. It pays to be subjective as much as possible. It's a great way to have your cake and eat it too. Criticize other people for not being objective. Be as subjective as you want. It's a great little racket. I'm glad we found it actually.
Source: Journalismjobs.com interview from 2005, archived at https://zfacts.com/zfacts.com/metaPage/lib/Weekly_Standard_M...
Rest in peace, sir. Hopefully with a cigarette and some fine scotch in hand. I will miss you greatly.
https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a15142347/ferrari-rein...
I still count myself as a liberal (more classical than modern) these days but I can't help but view a lot of standard progressive empty promises through an O'Rourke-ian lens.
It'd be more informative to look at who's funding healthcare now, including the private portions. I doubt very much that the bottom 50% are only covering 3% of that.
Again, can you show us the numbers? "A guy claimed it was so on the Internet" isn't really useful later as a source.
https://novaramedia.com/2021/08/30/david-graeber-was-right-a...
It is a moral hazard. First, it amounts to a giveaway to people aren't necessarily all that sympathetic -- people who can afford to go to college at all, even if they borrowed money to do it. Remember how much of the population couldn't even get that far. Second, any kind of student debt jubilee without first reforming the system just invites every future student to take as many loans as possible with the expectation that they too will have their debt forgiven.
You mean because of the sizable labor black market would shrivel up and suddenly all of these laborers would be able to collect on benefits on the taxes they've paid on the system? there is a good question there.
What is the approximate size of benefits that are getting funded but lie unclaimed by black market labor?
That sounds uncharitable, yes. But the same contingent that claims we cannot feasibly support universal healthcare due to the bottom 50% being essentially leeches on society happens to be the same people who insist that we cannot improve income for the bottom 50% because the free market is speaking.
Giving free healthcare to all the illegal immigrants would cost $100 billion; switching the single payer would save Americans a trillion.
> It sounds nice, until you think about the obvious result.
Making up a nice story isn't really "thinking". Let's see your actual numbers.
> Making up a nice story isn't really "thinking". Let's see your actual numbers.
Let's see yours. Trusting a politician's estimate for a bureaucrat's dream money pit is naivete at its peak.
According to this article: https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2020/01/416416/single-payer-system..., savings of 3.5% are likely in the first year of a single payer plan.
Edit: according to Bernie Sanders' plan, the total cost would be $32 trillion over 10 years. Here's a nice article debunking that claim: https://www.factcheck.org/2018/08/the-cost-of-medicare-for-a...
There is an adaptive and maladaptive side to that psychology.
The adaptive side is that all plans tend to work out at less than 100%. If you aspire to something just past your destination, you may actually reach where you originally wanted to go. If you aim right for it, you'll fall short. Also, reality doesn't always make it clear where the real boundaries are. Often you can accomplish more than is apparently possible if you have the courage to try.
The maladaptive side is considering any policy too coupled to reality as stinking of compromise and defeatism, or as a designed-to-fail Trojan horse from the other side. Any idea that might actually be feasible instead becomes suspect by virtue of its feasibility. The only goals you feel comfortable holding in your heart are ones that never risk getting sullied by any actual incremental progress.
I think progressives in the past used to be better at keeping their eyes on the future while getting their hands dirty with today's work. But, perhaps because of decades of horror shows like the War in Iraq, climate change, rising inequality, corporate take-over of culture, and political polarization, I see less of the latter. There's a sort of fatalism of prefering to die a martyr with hands unstained by sin than possibly staving off death by consorting with the enemy.
The Democrats have tried to "consort with the enemy" for three decades now, and all that happens is that the Republicans move further to the right and laugh at them.
For a while. It's easy to win by playing the villain in a single round prison's dilemma, but less so when iterated.
If you compromise and cooperate with the other party, some fraction of time you will make progress, and some fraction of time you'll get screwed because they're cooperation was a bad-faith trap.
It's certainly the case that at least since New Gingrich the odds of the former have grown much higher when Democratic politicians try to work with Republicans.
I think history will look back and see that Newt Gingrich shares a disproportionately large share of the blame for the tribal politics we are experiencing now. He wasn't first, but he was effective.
Much as I loath Gingrich, I think that the blame for transformation of political culture that he has gotten really from day one of his speakership is overblown, and that the two main factors are:
(1) the reversion to the normal alignment of partisan and ideological divides as the long era of the overlapping realignments of the post-Depression era (New Deal and Civil Rights) and,
(2) Clinton’s political triangulation strategy reducing opportunity for partisan differentiation on a wide range of high-saliency policy issues, driving a focus on personal and culture war issues as well as a rightward policy shift to re-enable differentiation on those issues (which itself required relying on personal and cultural identity politics heavily.)
Gingrich, was a problem, to be sure, but there is always a Gingrich around (many of them), but he became successful when he did because both structural forces and choices by the other party created an environment in which his approach would be rewarded.
If you mean idealism as a way of conducting your personal life, I don't think it has anything to do with any particular political persuasion.
If you mean idealism as a political philosophy, while I agree this is a defining property of progressives, for liberals, at least the classical liberals that were the original referent of the term, no. (Today "liberal" pretty much means the same thing politically as "progressive", but that wasn't always the case.) Classical Enlightenment liberalism was highly suspicious of idealism as a guiding principle of politics and public policy, because it recognized the limitations of humans. We are simply not smart enough to come up with useful idealism on the scale of a country. Every time we try, it causes far more problems than it solves. Classical liberals preferred to let institutions on a larger scale evolve from the bottom up, as people exercised their individual freedom of choice on a smaller scale and were held accountable by the people they interacted with.
Edit: to keep it in theme with PJ and the article, where PJ says that politicians always want wars on X because it's the only way to get people to move in a direction and they get to wield a baton... Of course such "wars" are only fought because someone makes money regardless of winner or loser, or they aren't really wars. Global Warming? Now THAT'S a war. You know it is, because it is ignored.
It's not generally what the parent means though, they probably meant essentially the powers of the Ds just virtue signal to get votes or rely on the comically evil other side to scare up votes, but never really work for a better welfare state, healthcare/benefits, equality, or the like.
The Biden administration is already a classic example. They could play hardball to get the votes, rein in Manchin, and other techniques. Instead, those minor hurdles are treated as unsolvable barriers and the status quo is maintained.
Because where is Biden from? Same place Obama was: the corporate arm / Democratic Leadership Council. Obama never prosecuted the mortgage crisis, never pursued breaking up the megabanks and monopolies, setup the internment camps for the refugees at our border, used drone assassinations, didn't get out of Iraq/Afghanistan, etc etc etc.
The only thing Obama did well IMO was spur investment in solar and wind, but that may have been an technological evolutionary inevitability. And maybe Obamacare, the right hated it so much it must have some good stuff in it.
"After I broke the news to him that his embedded Atlantic editor and good friend, Michael Kelly, perished on the charge to Baghdad when his Humvee was fired upon and crashed into a canal, I watched P.J. hunt-and-peck out an appreciation of Kelly on my borrowed laptop, tears in his eyes, scotch by his side, but never losing his cool. He peered in on the TV action – Iraqis looting their country like there was an all-you-can-steal fire sale – as he played the faux optimist, cracking, “This will eventually evolve into shopping.” " Goddamn is that funny.
I was in Australia when I read a piece from him on Desert Shield/Storm in an Aussie newspaper. I saved it. A few years later he was to sign books in DC, and I brought along the paper. He signed my book, and also signed the paper. I'd told him I'd seen it while in Australia. He said, "I wonder if I got paid for that?"
RIP, PJ. Thanks for the laughs and the insights.
Did O'Rourke ever say anything about 'cancel culture'? Because that book is an excellent example.
> And why aren't we making sure that that Fidel-snuggler Ron Dellums never works again?
(Ron Dellums: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Dellums)
> If we hope to wreck careers, destroy reputations, and drive holistic Ortega fans into exile in Sausalito and Amherst, we're going to need tactics very different from those used by Roy Cohn, Bobby Kennedy, and [McCarthy].
> We have to come up with more clever ways to ruin these people.
And from chapter 2: > We need some means of persecuting neuterers, nutters, and screaming greenies...
https://twitter.com/mgerber937/status/1494060745335660547
I never found him that funny. And I don't say that just because he was un-PC, or racist, or sexist -- though he was those things -- but because he didn't have good jokes, which is the only thing that matters in comedy:
> The Chinese have decided to import money instead of things they can immediately enjoy — my black Lab would make quite a stir fry.
This is hack, open-mic-nite-at-the-Sheraton stuff. Yawn.
I get that for people of a certain age (and sex and skin color) this was really cutting-edge, and part of the formative experiences of finding one's own sense of humor in the world, but its time was long past even when these jokes were best-sellers. It's me-me-me boomer stuff that doesn't work as comedy, and I think that's what ultimately sinks the guy's legacy.
Let me fix it for you:
> Yes. If you read carefully, nothing he says is even slightly funny … to me.
> Yes. If you actually do read carefully, nothing he says is even slightly funny.
It is easy to confuse snark with humor if you don't like who the snark is about. There were other people at the time who actually were consistently funny. Put them side by side and the difference is stark.
The not so subtle racism / sexism accusation plug (I disagree), segued into slamming of his work during his death is despicable. The ageism was cherry on top.
Opinions are fine, but it's my opinion that you should save the negativity at this time, unless it's a ruthless dictator.
I flagged your post and hopefully this comment thread gets nuked. It's a time of mourning, not a time of slander.
Nor is this the time or place for such accusations.
> Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
> Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
I don't think joking about stereotypes is racist. It's poking fun at it.
Just because you reference a stereotype doesn't mean you view your race as superior or another as inferior.
It may meet the definition in modern liberal CRT terms, but that's not what it was or the accepted definition among most people.
If you want to hijack the definition of racism go ahead, but don't be taken aback when you get called out for accusing someone of a term reserved for a person that hates another based on his race or believes he's not equal due to race.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lychee_and_Dog_Meat_Festival
Those are pretty serious accusations and seems odd of you to so cavalierly throw them out.
I’m not super knowledgeable about O’Rourke, but I’ve seen him around on tv shows and opinion pieces for a few decades and don’t think he’s sexist or racist.
If you’re going to make such statements, back them up a big.
Calling somebody a racist, casually, without any proof or even evidence, is contemptable.
I think the problem is that non-racist works are being conflated with something racist. I’d have to judge what’s racist joke as it’s hard nowadays to take someone’s world for it.
I've read a number of PJ's books and genuinely laughed out loud more times than I can count. Your comment, on the other hand, is exceptionally dull.
> Good writers make you want to read, but great writers make you want to write.
My memories of O'Rourke are mostly from his National Lampoon days.