Review: Parliament of Whores, by P. J. O'Rourke

It's all Rolling Stone's fault. I was a sophomore in high school, and RS issued one of its more famous covers: Janet Jackson, topless, with her breasts covered by an unknown person. (The coverer on the cover was later revealed to be Jackson's then-secret husband, René Elizondo, Jr.) Where did I see that issue? The chaplain's office, natch. Of course I picked it up and started leafing through the pages. This was the first periodical I remember reading that used the word "fuck". Excellent. Arriving home, I announced to my parents that I needed a subscription to Rolling Stone, immediately. My parents consented, I'm not sure why. Soon, every two weeks, I'd get another issue of pro-dope, pro-sex, anti-Bush (the first one) crusty-rock-critic propaganda, and it was good. One of the oddest things about Rolling Stone was that, buried in most issues, between William Grieder's latest well-researched polemic and the record reviews, you could find a piece by PJ O'Rourke.

Though I didn't know it at the time, PJ's a conservative. Not quite dyed-in-the-wool, and certainly not one who drinks the Republican Kool-Aid ("To mistrust science and deny the validity of the scientific method is to resign your job as a human"), but definitely a small-government, people-are-poor-because-it's-their-fault-conservative. At the time, I didn't pay much attention to the ideology of any particular author. If their stuff was good enough for RS, it was good enough for me. And PJ's stuff was funny. Really, really funny. "Republicans are the party that says that government doesn't work, and then get elected and prove it." "Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." Even when he said things that were patently ridiculous, he said them with style and wit. If Irish Diplomacy is telling a man to go to hell such that he looks forward to the journey, O'Rourke's writing so wonderfully delineated your foibles that you wished you had more for him to insult.

Parliament of Whores was the first O'Rourke book I read. It aims to eviscerate the American government, proving how wasteful and useless it (by and large) is. He's not particularly subtle, either, as chapter titles reveal: "Our Government: What the Fuck Do They Do All Day and Why Does It Cost So Goddamned Much Money?" Based on an assemblage of various columns he wrote for various publications (Rolling Stone, but also Automobile and National Review). My understanding is that one of the great privileges of upper-level journalism is that one can repurpose one's output every now and again into a book, thus creating a new stream of income from an old stream of outflow. Similar to the way cows repurpose grain into fertilizer. O'Rourke has wrapped each article in a bit of connective tissue, and occasionally edited the material to refer to earlier works in the book. For the most part, this works, though some pieces are rather shoehorned in. This can be forgiven, as the squarest peg, an analysis of so-called "Sudden Acceleration Incidents" by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which is the microcosm representing the federal bureaucracy, is one of the funniest pieces in the book.

O'Rourke isn't to be taken seriously. He's as his best at screeds and witticism. Actual facts are a bit thin on the ground, and generally, ah, repurposed to the author's dubious ends. The section where he cuts 25% from the federal goverment had me in stitches, though if I took any of it seriously, I'd be horrified.

I cut the entire international affairs "budget function," as they call it, except for food aid, refugee assistance and conduct of foreign affairs (because the State Department gives us a way to ship Ivy League nitwits overseas).

I got rid of all transportation spending. Let 'em walk.

If I outlaw rent control and discriminatory zoning and give landlords the right to evict criminals and deadbeats, I should be able to cut housing assistance in half.

The book was written (assembled?) in 1992, and covers pieces going back as far as 1988 (covering the inauguration of Papa Bush). There are some amusing bits of outdatedness, though, certainly, they're not O'Rourke's fault. Early in Bush 41's term, PJ predicted there was no way we wouldn't re-up the president in 1992. This was before no new taxes. In the aforementioned budget section, he cuts Air Force missile procurement in half because there's no one to point the missiles at. The most startling bit was early on, where PJ is outlining the purpose of the book.

[W]henever we regular citizens try to read a book on government or... listen to anything anybody who's in the government is saying, we feel like high school students who've fallen two weeks behind in their algebra class. Then, we grow drowsy and torpid and the next thing you know we are snoring like a gas-powered weed whacker. This could be intentional. Our goverment could be attempting to establish a Dictatorship of Boredom in this country. The last person left awake gets to spend all the tax money.

It's so incredibly pre-Internet that it stopped me in my tracks. It's almost cute. Now, we've just finished an administration that did its best to hide the workings of government from the people, and are ushering in another which promised to snow the people under with press releases, e-mails, youtube videos and any other possible way to connect with you and your wallet. What once might have evolved into a Dictatorship of Boredom has come to be a Clusterfuck of the Paranoid. The government doesn't trust the people and the people don't trust the government. And the only thing that's changed in the seventeen years since O'Rourke published his words is that there's more information available to the citizenry than ever before.

One other thing has changed: our ever-growing ideological polarization. O'Rourke wasn't just the first conservative author I read, he was probably the last (certainly, one of the few). I can stomach Paul Johnson, for instance, but most of the conservative commentary that falls in the humor section is either simply vicious or published in The Weekly Standard without even the courtesy of a wink. Things have gotten bad enough that people are reaching back in time to put down people purely because of their ideological bent. Reading a few of the comments at Amazon.com for Parliament of Whores, I was especially intrigued by those who gave this book one or two stars. Generally, their disgust with the book centered on the author's conservative proclivities. These reviews reminded me of a time a couple of years ago, when my Dad noticed a copy of one of O'Rourke's books on my shelf. "I never knew" said my father, "that he's one of the lunatics." Asking my father to explain, he said simply "He's a Republican." it saddened me, because, though I haven't read O'Rourke that much lately, he's not Rush and he's not Coulter. He's funnier, smarter and wittier than the both of them plus Al Franken and Janeane Garafalo. He doesn't spend a lot of time on ad hominem attacks, and sort of apologizes when he does. He's wicked, but he's also civil. I don't agree with all his politics, but I do agree with a lot of his assessments of the profligacy and impotence of government. And he's one of the best writers of humor I've ever read.