P.J. O'Rourke: 1947-2022

Remembering the Pro-Liberty Literary Iconoclast on His Seventy-Fifth Birthday

P.J. O’Rourke was born on this day in 1947 in Toledo, Ohio. I published this on February 15 on the occasion of his death, the untimeliness of which increases with each passing day.

Some of the most incisive, iconoclastic, and sui generis figures in a waning culture continue to depart. The latest is P.J. O’Rourke. Like the fairly recently departed George Carlin, Christopher Hitchens, and Neil Peart, he was a master of the English language, a champion of the written word, and a warrior for liberty. At times, he could remind a reader familiar with them of all three of them.

Like all writers of his stature, it is impossible to cover his importance, his essence, and his multifaceted virtues (he had few literary vices) in a succinct summation. Like many idiosyncratic giants in a world of false alternatives, he embodied many paradoxes (and just a few contradictions)—a caustic wit who could be touching and affecting; a libertarian individualist who stressed the importance of family (which undoubtedly influenced his more conservative later years); a humorist who addressed the most serious subjects, from totalitarianism to death of the young, with literary gravitas; a cranky, conservative “square” who published profane, subversive material in National Lampoon and Rolling Stone; an entertainer who could teach lessons on subjects from history to etymology; and a writer of universal scope who was sometimes at his most effective and inclusive with personal and autobiographical anecdotes. O’Rourke was occasionally inconsistent, but he rejected and eviscerated the ultimate false dichotomy of modern times, the conventional political spectrum, like no one else since Ayn Rand with an audience his size. He was the H.L. Mencken of modern times and, not incidentally, the Cato Institute’s H.L. Mencken Research Fellow; his writings were bristling with Menckenian vocabulary, allusions, and historical references. He left behind a diverse body of work replete with titles that speak for themselves: Modern Manners (1983); The Bachelor Home Companion (1986); Driving Like Crazy (2009); Eat the Rich: A Treatise on Economics (1999); and his political classic Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire US Government (1991). The latter is perhaps his most impressive, memorable, and sidesplitting work.

Born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1947, Patrick Jake O’Rourke came from a family of Republicans, many of whom made their living in the automotive industry, and he later devoted much of his writing to automotive publications. He would occasionally write of his past, his family’s troubles, his drug problems, and his jejune hippie youth rebelling against his Republican family. This is a confused, puerile culture with myriad false “narratives”, among them that “libertarianism” is a youthful stage that mature people outgrow with education and experience. Like all kinds of ex-leftists from Thomas Sowell to David Horowitz, O’Rourke went to school, got a job, “saw how the world works” (to use a trite trope), and cast aside his callow, youthful infatuation with Marxism with more than a little embarrassment. He recounts this period in pieces like “Second Thoughts About the Sixties” in Give War a Chance: Eyewitness Accounts of Mankind’s Struggle Against Tyranny, Injustice and Alcohol-Free Beer (1992) and Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut (1995). As a youth, he would ask his grandmother about the difference between Democrats and Republicans. “Democrats rent,” she quipped. (Times change.) At Thanksgiving dinner when he was a college freshman, she took him aside and said, “Patrick, it’s not true you’ve become a Democrat, have you?” He responded, “LBJ’s a fascist pig and tool for the military industrial complex! I’m a Maoist!” Relieved, she responded, “So long as you’re not a Democrat.”

Like Mencken, O’Rourke ridiculed the most horrendous, destructive ideas of his day, from the environmental movement to the overpopulation obsessives to the politically correct to the overly safety-conscious. He addressed those particular statist downers in the underrated All the Trouble in the World. Another unsung highlight of his, this from much later in his career, was Driving Like Crazy. Lampooning and mocking the coalition of killjoys and greens he observed killing the American car experience, he even attacked the Neo-Puritanism and creeping de facto prohibition of overly-aggressive and ineffective DUI enforcement. (He went so far as to call his nemeses the fun-suckers and the Mothers Against Everything.)

Reading O’Rourke was almost always fun, even when he recounted his harrowing and dangerous travels in some of the more dangerous parts of the world in Holidays in Hell (1989). [Decades later, while raising a family with his second wife, he waggishly alluded to the title in Holidays in Heck (2011), writing about his family vacations in twenty-first century America.) But his writing could also be strikingly heuristic in ways that few other writers, “humorists” or otherwise, could be anymore. A personal example: I vaguely remember my high school economics teacher talking about David Ricardo’s Law of Comparative Advantage. I did not retain the information even in the moment, which probably said more about my attention span at the time than this particular teacher. I have completely understood the law since the first time I read Eat the Rich, in which O’Rourke’s examples of comparative advantage are John Grisham and Courtney Love. Later, when I read about, e.g, Wat Tyler in Mencken’s writing, I was familiar with the peasant revolt from O’Rourke. I have no recollection of reading about or hearing about Tyler or his revolt in any other source, book, class, or program.

While known for many publications and topics, his magnum opus, Parliament of Whores, was dedicated to one primary target: government in the United States. Like all of his books, it is bristling with laugh-out-loud, inimitable apothegms. Just one example: “Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.”

Like almost every cultural figure, he was not perfect, in either the (impossible) Platonist sense or the (possible) Aristotelian sense. He could mix his metaphors to a heavy-handed extent. He did not completely reject the false dichotomy of the conventional political spectrum, drifting conservative as he aged and became a father. He would wreck an otherwise perfect piece, such as “Fiddling While Africa Starves”, his criticism of “We Are the World” and assorted humanitarian pop music of the time, with conventional, altruistic, and fundamentally anti-liberty ethics. Literarily, he was a sort of non-leftist Hunter Thompson, but he was fundamentally a religious conservative and too partisan a Republican. All of this is of no importance when considering the quality and quantity of the output he left us.

His influence was likely more than just political and literary. As an editor at National Lampoon, his work included their infamous high school yearbook parody, a forerunner of National Lampoon’s Animal House. Moreover, considering the shared writing and performing staff of National Lampoon (and its road shows) and Saturday Night Live, the late Matty Simmons, publisher of the former, may have been correct that the latter was essentially a sanitized, television version of the National Lampoon. As editor of the publication, he introduced John Hughes to a national audience. Unfortunately, those films and television shows did not have his intellect, incisiveness, or iconoclasm.

At one time, O’Rourke was reported to be the most quoted living man in a certain humor compendium. Whether or not that was true, it is an acute shock to learn that it is certainly not true now. A cancer survivor, he apparently did not publicly reveal his latest, brief fight with lung cancer. He died this morning at age seventy-four.

The septuagenarian O’Rourke was not quite as prolific in the age of Trump and Hiden Barris as he used to be. If he had anything to say about the disastrous, ruinous response to COVID-19, political and otherwise, I missed it. His silence, whether relative or total, was uncharacteristic and unfortunate. What is fortunate is that his corpus is an antidote and satirical sledgehammer to the kinds of ideas that spawned them, and all forms of statism, going forward.

As “cancel culture” and selective editing accelerates, it is prudent to save one’s print editions of his works and return to them for enlightenment and levity in this endarkened and grim era.