86 The Economist February 26th 2022
Obituary P. J. O’Rourke
Thoughhenevershowedaninterestindoingit,running for
political office often occupied P.J. O’Rourke’s mind. Nothing
bothered him so much as the sorry state of the American system,
when compared with the fine way it had started out. The nadir
came in 2016, when he watched the Trump/Clinton circus with ev
erincreasing horror. (“How the Hell Did That Happen?” was the
book that followed.) Mr Trump was clearly unstable; Mrs Clinton
was wrong about absolutely everything, but wrong within normal
parameters. For the first time in his life, holding his handsomely
large nose, he voted Democratic that November.
Would he, the Lone Humourist, make a better candidate? Very
possibly. Great name recognition: some 20 books, editorinchief
of National Lampoon, foreignaffairs chief at Rolling Stone, regular
columnist for the Weekly Standard and goto conservative on any
talk show. He looked presentable, too, in chinos, blue blazer and a
Brooks Brothers tie. It was a look modelled on Tom Wolfe, his fa
vourite member of a band of glasssharp satirists whose numbers
had been dwindling ever since Swift and Voltaire. The weirder you
were going to behave, the more normal you should look. He had
even written books, his first two, advising on mannerly and sober
living. (“Never do anything to your partner with your teeth that
you wouldn’t do to an expensive waterproof wristwatch.” “Never
serve oysters during a month that has no paycheque in it.”)
He was no elitist, however, but an average guy: a Buick man,
whose job as a teenager was to wash ‘n’ wax the cars his father sold.
His home town was Toledo, Ohio, one of America’s many run
downbutstillproud junkyards of capitalism. He had a master’s
in English, but earned it at a time of low qualitycontrol. All those
counted as pluses; for better or worse, voters liked candidates who
were like themselves. If they voted for a bunch of malevolent
trolls, like the members of the House, it was because they reck
oned there was something in it for them. That was the essence ofthe American system. When he called his most famous book “Par
liament of Whores”, it was not just Congress he meant. Some
members even surprised him with their sincerity. The real whores
were the citizenry whose demands made Congress the pisspoor
machine it was, and then blamed everybody else.
He wrote that book, and most of his others, to explain to read
ers things he didn’t understand himself. To explode the zerosum
economics that so entranced the left, when wealth was infinite, he
read 900 pages of Adam Smith. To fathom why some countries
failed and others thrived (the ones that endorsed free markets, of
course), he visited 70 or so countries, carefully conducting most of
his research in bars. (“Only one way to cover a story like this, and
make that a double, bartender, please.”) He did not venture often
into the deep end of thought, since it was not a very worthwhile
pastime and gave the brain, a mushy organ, unfair domination ov
er sturdier body parts. But every time he yanked another page from
his ibmSelectric iii (no computer geek he), he had more grist for a
terrific manifesto.
Its message could be summed up in one word, Freedom! and
one motto: Mind Your Own Business and Leave Me Alone. The less
government, the better. For example, marijuana had done a frac
tion of the harm that prohibition had. Marijuana did not kick
down your door in the middle of the night or peer through your
bedroom windows, as government did. Intervention was needed
only when people faced being destroyed, not when they imagined
they lacked some “right” or other. Rather than moping about what
they thought they were owed, citizens should consider what their
duties were. He felt ashamed later that, being chicken, his own no
tion of duty hadn’t included going to Vietnam.
It went without saying that he was a Republican, born, bred
and proud. A Republican Reptile, he confessed, harddrinking and
harddriving. He had never been a Democrat, only a youthful Mao
ist with a bad haircut, until Maoists proved both bullying and bor
ing. Yet his politics were not as simplistic as they seemed. Natural
ly God was a Republican, holding the mortgage to everything in
the world, and Santa Claus was a Democrat, promising everyone
everything they wanted down to getting the crab grass off their
lawns. But in government both parties made a thorough mess of
things. He was often more Libertarian, convinced that the only
curb on freedom to do as you damn well pleased was the other
guy’s freedom to do the same. And even more constantly he was
just a hater of dogooding liberals, with their fuzzyedged ideas,
their sanctimonious talk and their love of food fit only for rabbits.
In his America the Safety Nazis had no place, and what was fun
could not be wrong. The citizens chowed down on red meat, car
ried guns, called foreigners monkeys and kept big, beautiful gas
guzzlers in the carport, just as America was supposed to be.
His principles were so secure that they seemed to add up to an
ideal presidential character, as he described it on “60 Minutes”
once. If elected, he would do what he knew was right and take the
consequences. On the other hand the president was a national
toddler, so reliant on public opinion that he could do only what
the voters wanted. When asked how America might really be im
proved, the Lone Humourist sounded less sure. “Use your com
mon sense,” he suggested. “Be nice.” His Alternative Inaugural
Speech read: “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask me
how I can get the hell out of here.”
When he found out how, it would not be in the presidential
limousine but in a bloodred Ferrari 308 gts, the glorious car
which in 1980 he had driven at eyeblurring speed from New Jersey
to Los Angeles, revelling in his wonderful country. This time he
would head for New Hampshire, that fabulously lowtax, liberal
free state, and the lovely colonial mansion where he could hide
away from everything that infuriated him. Or almost everything
except the porcupine, so full of barbs that he could approach it on
ly with oven mitts and a broom handle, which had made its natu
ral home in his barn. nLone Humourist ScourgeP.J. O’Rourke, unsparing right-wing satirist and
commentator, died on February 15th, aged 74