American satirist P J O’Rourke died earlier this week at the age of 74. He made his name as a conservative commentator but was an equal opportunity satirist. For example, according to the obituary in the Washington Post, he once explained his position as follows:
During the 2016 presidential election, he came out against Donald Trump and endorsed Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, even as he called her âthe second-worst thing that can happen to his country.â
âI mean, sheâs wrong about absolutely everything, but sheâs wrong within normal parameters,â he said on an episode of [PBS program] âWait Wait.â Referring to Trump, he added, âThis man just canât be president.â
The New York Times offered other examples:
In 2010, The New York Times invited him and assorted other prominent people to define âRepublicanâ and âDemocrat.â He offered this:
âThe Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer and remove the crab grass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesnât work and then get elected and prove it.â […]
For many fans, his signature book was âParliament of Whores,â subtitled âA Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Governmentâ and first published in 1991.
âAlthough this is a conservative book,â Mr. OâRourke explained in the opening pages, âit is not informed by any very elaborate political theory. I have only one firm belief about the American political system, and that is this: God is a Republican and Santa Claus is a Democrat.â
Simon Evans in the website Spiked wrote this:
OâRourke had been an active commentator on America, both as a place to live and as an evil eye of Sauron projecting power into the darkest, dankest corners of an ungrateful, resentful world, for as long as Iâve been alive. His wormâs eye view of abroad was at least as interested in finding â and funding â the Way to the Next Whisky Bar, as it was in the more traditional, or at least official business of the foreign correspondent (most notably at Rolling Stone). He was clearly someone who regarded Evelyn Waughâs Scoop as much as a manual as a satire. But that didnât mean he ignored the political realities. It means he saw how theory impacted on reality, and which tended to come off worse.
As noted in previous posts, O’Rourke also expressed his enjoyment of Waugh’s novels Black Mischief and Put Out More Flags. I was reminded of some of Waugh’s 1930s writing (such as Black Mischief and Scoop) about what we now call third world countries by this quote in the Post:
âI was not prepared to do anything but upchuck and die,â he wrote of a trip to Paraguay, âafter the eight-hour night flight from Miami on an Air Paraguay DC-8 older than most second wives that flew through the center of five Dr. Frankenstein-your-lab-is-on-the-phone lightning storms and aboard which I was served a dinner of roast softball in oleo.â
That may not be the way Waugh would have written it, but the sentiments are the same. P J O’Rourke will certainly be missed, particularly as this is an election year.
