P J O'Rourke Online

The Times Loses It: Sense and nonsense about Tucson

2011-01-17T09:01:00.000-05:00

It was a weekend of great sorrow. On Saturday, January 8, an insane young man tried to kill Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, injuring her horribly. The man then fired his gun into a small political gathering, murdering a nine-year-old girl, a federal judge, a congressional staffer, and three of Giffords’s constituents. Thirteen other people were wounded. In the midst of life we are in death. There is, in this world, no making sense of such events.

Among the worldly, however, there is a temptation to make nonsense. Thus it was that on Sunday, January 9, the New York Times provided a further grief, much less important than the death and mutilation of innocents but shameful nonetheless.

The Times ran, as its second lead, above the fold on the front page, a story about the Tucson shootings headlined “Bloodshed Puts New Focus on Vitriol in Politics.” The article, by Carl Hulse and Kate Zernike, contains almost nothing newsworthy. Nor can it be called news analysis, beginning as it does with an attempt to create a self-fulfilling prophecy: “The shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords ... set off what is likely to be a wrenching debate over anger and violence in American politics.”

If self-fulfilling prophecies were wanted from reporters — and they are not — a better one would have been “Bloodshed Puts New Focus on Mental Health Policies.” The person in custody for the Tucson crimes is, according to all accounts, profoundly crazy. For decades in America there has been an effort to ensure that the rights of those who are not sane are the same as the rights of those who are. Perhaps a wrenching debate over this should be had.

In the article’s second paragraph we are told that the accused, Jared Loughner, had an Internet site that “contained antigovernment ramblings.” The same may be said — at least in respect to ramblings against the newly sworn-in House of Representatives — about Internet sites posting speeches by President Obama.

But antigovernment ramblings coming from outside the government are so sinister that they are sinister whether they are sinister or not. “And regardless of what led to the episode,” Hulse and Zernike say, “it quickly focused attention on the degree to which inflammatory language, threats and implicit instigations to violence have become a steady undercurrent in the nation’s political culture.”

To maintain that there’s a lack of evidence for such a sweeping statement would be inaccurate since Hulse and Zernike themselves are doing what they claim is being done. And given the tight deadlines of a Sunday edition they have focused their attention quickly indeed.

Continued here (The Weekly Standard, dated 24 January 2011)

WikiLeaks: Were I An Alien ...

2010-12-08T03:10:00.002-05:00

NPR asked PJ what aliens might think of the USA in light of the the WikiLeaks release:

Maybe aliens would think: What amazing lengths the vast right tentacled conspiracy will go to discredit Hillary Clinton.

Or maybe: Earthlings keep no secrets, so they hate each other! This will destroy Earth... every alien's dream!

Or maybe:

Continued here (NPR, broadcast on 8 December 2010)

General Motors should have gone bankrupt

2010-12-07T03:03:00.002-05:00

PJ O'Rourke tells the BBC's HARDtalk's Stephen Sackur why he thinks the US car giant General Motors should not have been bailed out with taxpayers' money and explains why he believes US swing states played a large role in the outcome.

Continued here (BBC World News, broadcast on 7 December 2010)

PJ on Political Satire

2010-11-30T21:04:00.000-05:00

Every day Five Books interviews an eminent writer, thinker, commentator, politician, academic on five books on their specialist subject. P J O’Rourke talks on Political Satire and selects classics by Swift, Huxley, Orwell and Waugh. He says we now live in the world of 1984 but, instead of being a horror show, a television that looks back at you is just a pain in the ass. It’s 1984-Lite. Sad in one way, but a relief in another.

Continued here

PJ's speech at IQ²

2010-11-22T03:29:00.001-05:00

In the wake of his latest book, "Don’t Vote! It Just Encourages the Bastards", P J spoke at Cadogan Hall about the free market, the current economic crisis, Iraq, abortion and Sarah Palin’s prospects of making it to the White House in 2012.

"I'm not that funny," he informed us, "but I guess I am for a Republican".

In his speech, O’Rourke analyses freedom based upon positive and negative ‘rights’. He takes Isaiah Berlin’s distinction and renames them ‘gimme’ rights and ‘get outta here’ rights. The gimme rights, such as healthcare, education, housing and high speed broadband, are the ones that we expect the Government to provide for us, and the ‘get outta here’ rights, such as the right to bear arms and the right to privacy, are those which seek to provide us freedom from both government and our fellow citizens. O’Rourke is particularly concerned with the way in which the baby boomer generation failed to recognise the difference and the true cost of ‘gimme’ rights in both financial and political terms.

Continued here (dated 22 November 2010)

I Think We Lost the Election

2010-11-13T21:29:00.002-05:00

I think we lost the election on November 2. Every race was won by a politician. True, we elected some angry nuts. These are preferable to common politicians. Their anger provokes honesty, and their mental illness prevents honesty from being obscured by charm. (What a loss -Barney Frank would have been as an exemplar of the furious, insane left!) We also elected some amateur politicians. However, politics is like vivisection—disturbing as a career, alarming as a hobby. And we may have elected a few reluctant politicians. But not reluctant enough.

We will win an election when all the seats in the House and Senate and the chair behind the desk in the Oval Office and the whole bench of the Supreme Court are filled with people who wish they weren’t there.

In a free country government is a dull and onerous responsibility. It is a parent-teacher conference. The teacher is a pompous twit. Our child is a lazy pain in the ass. We undertake this social obligation with weary reluctance. And we only do it at all because the teacher (political authority) deserves cold stares, hard questions, and maybe firing, and the pupil (that portion of society which, alas, needs governing) deserves to be grounded without TV and have its Internet access screened and its allowance docked.

America’s elected and appointed officials ought to be longing to return to their personal lives and private interests. They should feel burdened by their powers, irked with their responsibilities, and embarrassed at their prominence in the public eye. When they say they want to spend more time with their families, they should mean it.

Continued here (The Weekly Standard, dated 13 November 2010)

Facts Meet Freedom: On the Air in Afghanistan

2010-11-01T21:27:00.002-04:00

At dinner in Prague with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s president, Jeff Gedmin, and half a dozen RFE/RL staffers, Gedmin said, to no one in particular, “Do you think at any time in the future history will look back and say, ‘I wish they hadn’t broadcast so much information’?”

It will be an unpleasant future if history says that. And it won’t be RFE/RL’s fault. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty broadcasts information to Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East in twenty-eight languages. Much of the information comes from the places where those twenty-eight languages are spoken. RFE/RL has five hundred and fifty employees in Prague—speaking the twenty-eight languages and then some—forty more back in Washington, and several hundred full- and part-time correspondents, editors, and technicians at bureaus in eighteen countries. Reporters are also working, sometimes clandestinely, in countries where RFE/RL bureaus aren’t allowed. The mission is to tell people living in those countries what is happening to them.

“I don’t know what’s happening to me” would be a statement of psychological or sociological distress in a liberal democracy, but it’s a plain statement of fact concerning the material world for anyone who doesn’t live in a liberal democracy. Government censorship of media, government influence on or ownership of media, and simple lack of infrastructure keep several billion people uninformed about the most important and intimate matters in their own lives. (And according to Radio Farda, RFE/RL’s Iranian service, the Iranian judiciary has ruled that psychology and sociology should not be taught in schools.)

The concept of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is “surrogate broadcasting”—doing the job that independent media would do if there were any or enough of it in the places RFE/RL serves. Jeff Gedmin calls it “holding up a mirror.” It’s a Cold War idea. Radio Free Europe’s first broadcast was to Czechoslovakia in 1950, as the Communists were using show trials and purges to solidify their control in Prague.

Continued here (World Affairs, dated November/December 2010)

Bloomberg grills PJ

2010-10-27T03:34:00.003-04:00

PJ talks about his new book, "Don't Vote, It Just Encourages the Bastards", with Bloomberg Midday Surveillance host Tom Keene:

KEENE: What do you type at now? Do you do it like the original IBM Selectric, an old Royal?

PJ: I do. I do. I have three of them. As people go to computers, they give me their old Selectric and I've got one old guy, who used to work for IBM, who still knows how to fix them and when he goes I don't know what is going to happen.

KEENE: Can you get parts?

PJ: Apparently he knows some crazy company off in Indonesia or someplace who still make parts for these things.

KEENE: The emotion, "Don't Vote, It Just Encourages The Bastards." That's a great photo.

PJ: I had my golf clothes.

KEENE: That's your golf clothes, nice tie. That looks like a bow tie I could wear, no question about that. There's the book. I want to bring up this chart which I think is the backdrop for your wonderful effort here, the humor, the Libertarian sense of it. U6 underemployment, this country is under employed and it a lot different than when you wrote "Modern Manners" in 1994.

PJ: Oh, yes, yes, when the country was over employed, way too busy.

Continued here (Bloomberg Midday Surveillance, dated 27 October 2010)

They Hate Our Guts and they’re drunk on power

2010-10-23T21:25:00.002-04:00

Perhaps you’re having a tiny last minute qualm about voting Republican. Take heart. And take the House and the Senate. Yes, there are a few flakes of dander in the fair tresses of the GOP’s crowning glory—an isolated isolationist or two, a hint of gold buggery, and Christine O’Donnell announcing that she’s not a witch. (I ask you, has Hillary Clinton ever cleared this up?) Fret not over Republican peccadilloes such as the Tea Party finding the single, solitary person in Nevada who couldn’t poll ten to one against Harry Reid. Better to have a few cockeyed mutts running the dog pound than Michael Vick.

I take it back. Using the metaphor of Michael Vick for the Democratic party leadership implies they are people with a capacity for moral redemption who want to call good plays on the legislative gridiron. They aren’t. They don’t. The reason is simple. They hate our guts.

They don’t just hate our Republican, conservative, libertarian, strict constructionist, family values guts. They hate everybody’s guts. And they hate everybody who has any. Democrats hate men, women, blacks, whites, Hispanics, gays, straights, the rich, the poor, and the middle class.

Democrats hate Democrats most of all. Witness the policies that Democrats have inflicted on their core constituencies, resulting in vile schools, lawless slums, economic stagnation, and social immobility. Democrats will do anything to make sure that Democratic voters stay helpless and hopeless enough to vote for Democrats.

Continued here (The Weekly Standard, dated 23 October 2010)

New Book: Don't Vote It Just Encourages the Bastards

2010-09-21T13:38:00.003-04:00

Put the United States of America’s big, fat political ass on a diet. Lose that drooping deficit. Slim those spreading entitlement programs. Firm up that flabby pair of butt cheeks that are the Senate and the House. Having had a lot of fun with what politicians do, P J O’Rourke now has a lot of fun with what should be thought about those politicians. Nothing good, to be sure.

Instead of starting with deep political thinkers of yore such as Hume, Locke, and John Stuart Mill, in his new book, DON’T VOTE — It Just Encourages the Bastards, O’Rourke starts with a party game of late-night giggle sessions in all-girls boarding schools: “Kill, F@#%, Marry.” Pick three men — or, in O’Rourke’s version, three political ideologies, ie, Democrat, Republican, and Independent (aka Confused). Then you choose which to terminate with extreme prejudice, which to go for a roll in the hay, and which to settle down with permanently for a boring life in the suburbs.

This astute tool of political analysis works on the parts of government as well as on the political thinking that led to those parts: kill the Department of Education, screw Social Security, and marry the Armed Forces. The same for political policies: screw the bailout, marry a balanced budget, and kill health care reform before it kills you.

O’Rourke explores the basis of American democracy — the power, freedom, and responsibility that are the “Kill, F@#%, Marry” of liberty and self-rule. He favors — reluctantly, he admits — responsibility.

He goes on to examine the hilarious irresponsibility of America’s political establishment on every issue, from the woes of nation building to the financial crisis (“The best investment I’ve made lately? I left a $20 bill in the pocket of my tweed jacket last spring, and I just found it”), the bailout, health care reform (“Something doesn’t add up. Politicians are telling me that I can smoke, drink, gain two hundred pounds, then win an iron man triathlon at age ninety-five”), the stimulus package, climate change (“There’s not a god-damn thing you can do about it ... There are 1.3 billion people in China and they all want a Buick”), trade imbalance, the end of the American automobile industry, U.S. foreign policy and the Family of Nations (“Uncle Russia’s out on parole, drunk, unemployed, and likely to kill some folks next door again soon”), campaign finance reform, gun control, No Child Left Behind (“What if they deserve to be left behind?”), and pretty much everything else under the sun.

Continued here

Innocence Abroad: The Tea Party's Search for Foreign Policy

2010-09-01T21:14:00.001-04:00

What is the Tea Party’s foreign policy? It’s a difficult question on two counts. There is no Tea Party foreign policy as far as I can tell, and, on inspection, there is no Tea Party. There are, of course, any number of Tea Party Coalition groups across the country. But these mix and mingle, cooperate, compete, debate, merge, and overlap with countless other groups grouped together as the “Tea Party movement” in the public mind (or the public commentator mind).

Some of these organizations have staffs and salaries and offices, and some—according to the time left over for blogging after job and children—have memberships numbering between one and none. Various domestic policy foundations such as FreedomWorks, Americans for Prosperity, and the Independence Institute have had their influence, as have associations of people with a frame of mind about policy that’s more antinomian, such as FedUpUSA. Then there is the 9/12 Project, promoted by Glenn Beck, which seeks a return to the best of what Americans thought and felt after 9/11 and which is more concerned with values than policy per se. A variety of social conservatives with similar concerns about values—if diverse ideas of what those values are—also have been lumped with the Tea Party movement. Sometimes they’ve lumped themselves.

Disaggregation and multifariousness make it hard to take any policy measure of the Tea Party. But the tougher problem is definitional. “Movement” implies a destination. When you move you’re headed somewhere. Political movements have a place they want government to go. The Tea Party movement has a place it wants government to go—and rot. That’s different. The Tea Party has a political attitude rather than a political ideology.

Nonetheless, every political concept has foreign policy implications. George Washington warned against foreign entanglements. But the friends, enemies, and neighbors of that new concept, the United States, soon found themselves entangled in American foreign policy, even before America knew it had one.

Continued here (World Affairs, dated September/October 2010)

The 72-Hour Expert

2010-08-30T13:29:00.000-04:00

If you spend 72 hours in a place you’ve never been, talking to people whose language you don’t speak about social, political, and economic complexities you don’t understand, and you come back as the world’s biggest know-it-all, you’re a reporter. Either that or you’re President Obama. I called my wife. She said, no, she certainly is not vacationing at government expense in some jet-set hot spot with scads of her BFFs. Looks like I’m not President Obama. But I am a reporter, fresh from Kabul. What do you want to know about Afghanistan, past, present, or future? Ask me anything.

As all good reporters do, I prepared for my assignment with extensive research. I went to an Afghan restaurant in Prague. Getting a foretaste—as it were—of my subject, I asked the restaurant’s owner (an actual Afghan), “So what’s up with Afghanistan?” He said, “Americans must understand that Afghanistan is a country of honor. The honor of an Afghan is in his gun, his land, and his women. You take a man’s honor if you take his gun, his land or his women.”

And the same goes for where I live in New Hampshire. I inquired whether exceptions could be made, on the third point of honor, for ex-wives. “Oh yes,” he said.

Afghanistan—so foreign and yet so familiar and, like home, with such wonderful lamb chops. I asked the restaurateur about other similarities between New Hampshire and Afghanistan. “I don’t know,” he said. “Most of my family lives in L.A.”

In Kabul I was met at the airport by M. Amin Mudaqiq, bureau chief for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Afghan branch, Radio Azadi. “Our office is just down the main road,” he said, “but since it’s early in the morning we’ll take the back way, because of the Suicides.” That last word, I noticed, was pronounced as a proper noun, the way we would say “Beatles” slightly differently than “beetles.” And, in a sense, suicide bombers do aspire to be the rock stars of the Afghan insurgency (average career span being about the same in both professions).

“The Suicides usually attack early in the morning,” Amin said. “It’s a hot country and the explosive vests are thick and heavy.”

I’d never thought about suicide bombing in terms of comfort. Here’s some guy who’s decided to blow himself gloriously to bits and he’s pounding the pavement all dressed up in the blazing sun, sweat running down his face, thinking, “Gosh this thing itches, I’m pooped, let’s call it off.”

“It’s the same with car bombs,” Amin said. “You don’t want to be driving around the whole day with police everywhere and maybe get a ticket.”

Imagine the indignity of winding up in traffic court instead of the terrorist equivalent of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Continued here (The Weekly Standard, dated 30 August - 6 September 2010)

End Them, Don’t Mend Them

2010-06-21T13:26:00.000-04:00

The school year is drawing to a close. Time to balance the educational accounts and see what’s been learned. Though not by my kids. I don’t worry about them. They’re geniuses like your kids and soak up knowledge the way a sponge (or a SpongeBob) does. Muffin, in sixth grade, has learned that Justin Bieber is very talented and doesn’t—really, Dad—sing like a girl. Poppet, third grade, has learned how the Plains Indians made tepees. (They waited until after dinner to announce that their “Lifestyles of the Cheyenne” project was due tomorrow so that all the Cheyenne dads were up until one in the morning gluing dowels and brown wrapping paper to a piece of AstroTurf.) And Buster, kindergarten, has learned he can make himself giggle hysterically by adding “poop” to any phrase. The Little Engine That Could Poop.

No, the accounts that I’m balancing—and it’s quite educational—are bank accounts. What’s been learned is that it costs a fortune to send kids to school. Figures in the Statistical Abstract of the United States show that we are spending $11,749 per pupil per year in the U.S. public schools, grades pre-K through 12. That’s an average. And you, like me, don’t have average children. So we pay the $11,749 in school taxes for the children who are average and then we pay private school tuition for our own outstanding children or we move to a suburb we can’t afford and pay even more property taxes for schools in the belief that this makes every child outstanding.

Continued here (The Weekly Standard, dated 21 June 2010)

Not Dead Yet

2010-06-07T13:24:00.000-04:00

I have an idea for a brand new type of newspaper feature. And gosh do newspapers need one. No industry in living memory has collapsed faster than daily print journalism. You can still buy a buggy whip, which is more than can be said for a copy of the Rocky Mountain News, Cincinnati Post, or Seattle Post-Intelligencer. One would think that a business in such dire condition would be—for desperation’s sake—wildly innovative. But newspapers exhibit a fossilization of form and content that’s been preserved in sedimentary rock since the early 1970s when the “Women’s Pages” were converted to the “Leisure Section.” General Motors itself showed more inventive originality on its way to Chapter 11, as the two people who bought Pontiac Azteks can attest.

Readers are fleeing newspapers. What are newspapers offering to lure them back? Out-of-register color photographs have replaced blurry black and white pics. More working women and black people appear in comic strips. (Although comparisons to Walt Kelly’s “Pogo” and Al Capp’s “L’il Abner” show, if anything, a decline in the social relevance of the funny pages, “Marmaduke” always excepted.) Various versions of “Dr. Gridlock” have been instituted so that when you get to work and open your morning paper you can see why you didn’t get to work. That avant-garde broadsheet the New York Times supplemented its dull “Corrections” with a “Public Editor” who combines pomposity with groveling as only a New York Times editor can. And, in “Styles of the Times,” Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust have been crossbred with Anna Wintour to produce something for famously overdressed people with scary romantic entanglements that’s known in the trade as the Gay Sports Pages. Then there’s Sudoku. (Tip for silencing airplane seatmates: Take out a Friday Sudoku and rapidly fill every box in ink—it’s not like they’ll check if your numbers are right.)

One bright idea isn’t going to solve the problems of the American newspaper industry, but it’s one bright idea more than the American newspaper industry has had in 40 years. What I propose is “Pre-Obituaries”—official notices that certain people aren’t dead yet accompanied by brief summaries of their lives indicating why we wish they were.

Continued here (The Weekly Standard, dated 7 June 2010)

A Plague of ‘A’ Students

2010-05-03T13:22:00.000-04:00

Barack Obama is more irritating than the other nuisances on the left. Nancy Pelosi needs a session on the ducking stool, of course. But everyone with an ugly divorce has had a Nancy. She’s vexatious and expensive to get rid of, but it’s not like we give a damn about her. Harry Reid is going house-to-house selling nothing anybody wants. Slam the door on him and the neighbor’s Rottweiler will do the rest. And Barney Frank is self-punishing. Imagine being trapped inside Barney Frank.

The secret to the Obama annoyance is snotty lecturing. His tone of voice sends us back to the worst place in college. We sit once more packed into the vast, dreary confines of a freshman survey course—“Rocks for Jocks,” “Nuts and Sluts,” “Darkness at Noon.” At the lectern is a twerp of a grad student—the prototypical A student—insecure, overbearing, full of himself and contempt for his students. All we want is an easy three credits to fulfill a curriculum requirement in science, social science, or fine arts. We’ve got a mimeographed copy of last year’s final with multiple choice answers already written on our wrists. The grad student could skip his classes, the way we intend to, but there the s.o.b. is, taking attendance. (How else to explain this year’s census?)

America has made the mistake of letting the A student run things. It was A students who briefly took over the business world during the period of derivatives, credit swaps, and collateralized debt obligations. We’re still reeling from the effects. This is why good businessmen have always adhered to the maxim: “A students work for B students.” Or, as a businessman friend of mine put it, “B students work for C students—A students teach.”

It was a bunch of A students at the Defense Department who planned the syllabus for the Iraq war, and to hell with what happened to the Iraqi Class of ’03 after they’d graduated from Shock and Awe. The U.S. tax code was written by A students. Every April 15 we have to pay somebody who got an A in accounting to keep ourselves from being sent to jail. Now there’s health care reform—just the kind of thing that would earn an A on a term paper from that twerp of a grad student who teaches Econ 101.

Why are A students so hateful? I’m sure up at Harvard, over at the New York Times, and inside the White House they think we just envy their smarts. Maybe we are resentful clods gawking with bitter incomprehension at the intellectual magnificence of our betters. If so, why are our betters spending so much time nervously insisting that they’re smarter than Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement? They are. You can look it up (if you have a fancy education the way our betters do and know what the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary is). “Smart” has its root in the Old English word for being a pain. The adjective has eight other principal definitions ranging from “brisk” to “fashionable” to “neat.” Only two definitions indicate cleverness—smart as in “clever in talk” and smart as in “clever in looking after one’s own interests.” Don’t get smart with me.

Continued here (The Weekly Standard, dated 3 May 2010)

Dear Mr President ... Unhappy in Our Own Way

2010-01-01T13:16:00.001-05:00

In your conduct of foreign policy, I had expected you to be wrong. I hadn’t expected you to be a self-righteous bumbler, lecturing humanity on morals while possessing no clear moral vision of your own. You are the kind of thinker who outsmarts no one but himself, by turns too skeptical and too credulous, too permissive and too controlling, too understanding and too obtuse.

You’re acting . . . like me.

That’s exactly the way I behave with my family. The problem is, your family is larger. I’m the head of the O’Rourkes. You’re the head of the Family of Nations.

The Family of Nations is a wrongheaded notion but not without its value as an analytical tool, if the countries of the world are considered as members of a large, raucous, conniving, belligerent Irish clan, some of them inebriated with fanaticism, others fanatically inebriated, and all of them asking each other—as the O’Rourke motto goes—“Is this a private fight, or can anyone join in?”

I suppose you imagine that someday there will be a stirring display of clan loyalty with the tribe uniting in the face of a common foe, such as global warming. The Family of Nations will coalesce to battle a mutual adversary. But until the wingéd apes with ray guns arrive, arrangements such as the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the Copenhagen Treaty on Climate Change will be bloody affairs, like a wedding reception at the Friends of Hibernia Hall or a wake at the Shamrock and Pig.

So how are you doing as patriarch in the household of humankind? Here’s one question to gauge your standing with the relatives: Do they all go to you asking for money? You’re good on this count. You’ve displayed an open hand to all who come your way, and you’ve dropped hints that you’ll even go to them to dispense largesse, be they as far away as Tehran or Pyongyang. You’re the soul of generosity, as have been all the chieftains who’ve come before you since Woodrow Wilson (except for Calvin Coolidge). Never mind that it’s not your money, that it belongs to your rich, nervous, high-strung aunt, American Business. Aunt Busy is suffering from a bit of a breakdown at the moment. You’ve gotten your hands on her power of attorney and you’re frittering away her wealth.

Continued here (World Affairs Journal, dated January/February 2010)

Red Warbler

2009-10-12T08:11:00.002-04:00

Review of "The Protest Singer - An Intimate Portrait of Pete Seeger" by Alec Wilkinson:

This is an important book. As with any book about which this needs to be said, what's meant is that it isn't important at all. It's a hagiography of Pete Seeger--and not even a proper, thorough one with sheet music, lyrics, and recording history. But there are important aspects to the book, none of them intentional.

Pete Seeger is a modest, unassuming, cheerful, and kind-natured man. He's a good folk singer, if you can stand folk singing. And he's such an excellent banjo player that you almost don't wish you had a pair of wire cutters. His abilities as a composer range from the fairly sublime ("Turn, Turn, Turn") to the fairly awful ("If I Had a Hammer") by way of the fairly ridiculous ("Where Have All the Flowers Gone?").

He built his own house--rather badly, as far as I can tell. And he lives in it--rather well, with a loving wife and frequent visits from doting friends and relatives. He's spent his life being in favor of the right things, such as decent wages, racial equality, peace, and a clean Hudson River, and being opposed to the wrong things such as hunger, bigotry, violence, and a dirty Hudson River. He was also a member of the Communist party long past that organization's youthful-idealism sell-by date.

Continued here (The Weekly Standard, dated 12 October 2009)

Outsourcing Hate

2009-10-05T08:16:00.001-04:00

Whew, I'm pooped. Jimmy Carter has got me run ragged with all the hating I'm supposed to do. Jimmy says I'm a racist because I oppose President Obama's health care reform program. Even Jimmy Carter can't be wrong all the time. And since Jimmy Carter has been wrong about every single thing for the past 44 years, maybe--just as a matter of statistical probability--he's right this time.

I hadn't noticed I was a racist, but that was no doubt because I was too busy being a homophobe. Nancy Pelosi says the angry opposition to health care reform is like the angry opposition to gay rights that led to Harvey Milk being shot. Since I do not want America to suffer another Sean Penn movie, I will accept that I'm a homophobe, too. And I'm a male chauvinist due to the fact that I think Nancy Pelosi is blowing smoke--excuse me, carbon neutral, biodegradable airborne particulate matter--out her pantsuit.

Also, I'm pretty sure Rahm Emanuel is Jewish, and you can't be against (or even for) President Obama without the involvement of Rahm Emanuel, so I'm an anti-Semite. Furthermore, although I personally happen to be a libertarian on immigration issues, I do agree with Joe Wilson that you can't say you're expanding health care to the poor and then pretend you're going to turn those poor away if their driver's licenses look a little Xeroxy and what's on their Social Security cards turns out to be a toll-free number for a La Raza hotline. Thus I'm prejudiced against Hispanics as well.

I'm a 61-year-old man with three young children and a yard to rake. While I appreciate the attention from our most ex- of ex-presidents, I'm really too busy to properly accomplish all this loathing and detestation. I quit smoking so I don't even have a lighter to set crosses on fire. We don't happen to own white bed sheets and I'm five nine and--dressed in Ralph Lauren candy stripes and tripping on fitted corners--I'd feel like a fool at Klan rallies (and Tea Parties and Town Hall meetings, to the extent that there's a difference).

Then I have the task of finding people to disrespect, denigrate, and discriminate against. I know people who are black, gay, Jewish, and Hispanic. But, unfortunately, I like them. When you like a person it's difficult to treat him (or even her) with the kind of vigorous and unrestrained bigotry that Jimmy Carter expects me to engage in. I have to go looking for people (people of the proper race, creed, and ethnic origin) whom I can't stand. That jackass from the gas company who kicked my dog (even though Valkyrie hardly broke the skin) won't do. The meter reader is a New Hampshire Yankee.

This is exactly the problem. I live in rural New Hampshire and we are, frankly, short on people who are black, gay, Jewish, and Hispanic. In fact, we're short on people. My town has a population of 301. When it comes to bias we're pretty much reduced to an occasional slur against French-Canadians. But my grandfather was French-Canadian, so I feel that it is somewhat inappropriate for me to express scorn for Frenchies. That is, liberals have a monopoly on self-loathing as a result of neurosis entitlements and affirmative anxiety programs for which I, as a Republican, do not qualify. Thus it is that I have to drive all the way to Dorchester and then out to Provincetown and down to New York City and back to be narrow minded enough to satisfy Jimmy Carter, Nancy Pelosi, Rahm Emmanuel, and their friend Hugo Chávez.

Continued here (The Weekly Standard, dated 5 October 2009)

Still 'Crazy' -- And Proud of It

2009-08-31T08:20:00.000-04:00

Us right-wing nuts sure is scary! That's the message from the Washington Post. To put this in language a conservative would understand, the fourth estate has been alarmed once again by the Burkean proclivities of our nation's citizens. The Post is in a panic about (to use its own descriptive terms) "birthers," "anti-tax tea-partiers," and "town hall hecklers."

If, last Sunday, you spent a profitless hour reading the Washington Post (itself not too profitable), you noticed the loud yapping and desperate nipping at those who disagree with liberal orthodoxy. It was as if top management were a toy schnauzer accidentally mistaken for a duster and traumatized by being run back and forth through the venetian blinds. The wise and prestigious broadsheet institution was so barking mad that it sent three (Three! In these times of hardship for the print media! When reporters are being laid off right and left--well, mostly right--and stories are going uncovered from rapidly warming pole to pole! Three!) journalists to do battle with "The Return of Right-Wing Rage."

That was the subtitle of Rick Perlstein's section B leader. The title was "In America, Crazy Is a Preexisting Condition." Perlstein wrote the book Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus so you can intuit (or "grok" as Perlstein might put it, given his prose style) the contents of his article. Yes, Rick, right-wing rage has returned. It was up at my place for the weekend. But it's back, and it's not like right-wing rage ever really went away. It didn't, as you would say, Rick, "move on."

Accompanying the Perlstein screed was a sidebar by Alec MacGillis explaining how "health care reform is not that hard to understand, and those who tell you otherwise most likely have an ulterior motive."

All you town hall hecklers, calm down and go home. Never mind that Alec MacGillis is a rat, something that's evident by the sixth sentence of his piece: "Fixing [health care] could be very simple: a single-payer system." And never mind that his writing is more than uninformative, it is informationally subtractive. Read him and you'll know less than you know now about what the government is going to do to you and your doctor. Read him carefully and you'll know nothing.

Continued here (The Weekly Standard, dated 31 August 2009)

Sex, Drugs, Music, Mud - Woodstock at 40

2009-08-22T08:24:00.000-04:00

Reviews of "The Road to Woodstock" by Michael Lang, "Woodstock Revisited" by Susan Reynolds and "Woodstock" by Brad Littleproud and Joanne Hague:

No social phenomenon can be completely analyzed, thoroughly critiqued, and given its full philosophical due in just one word. Except Woodstock. Altamont.

And that--except for the shaded sidebar containing the titles of the reviewed books--should be the end of this book review. However, the long weekend of August 15-17, 1969, was one of the great where-weren't-you? moments of recent history. Along with 202,177,000 other Americans, where I wasn't was at Woodstock.

Though it was not for lack of trying. I was 21 and smitten with a girl--call her Sunflower--from exotic Massapequa, Long Island. I had come by motorcycle from Ohio with the idea of Sunflower riding pillion to a "Woodstock Music and Arts Fair" which, according to a poster in a record shop back in Yellow Springs, was "An Aquarian Exposition" featuring "Three Days of Peace and Music." I pictured something on the order of a wind chime sale with evening hootenannies and maybe a surprise guest appearance by Mimi Fariña.

Sunflower, alas, chose the Sunday prior to make a feeble gesture at doing away with herself. (Such feeble gestures were more or less obligatory among fine arts major co-eds in those days. There was a bridge at an Ohio women's college from which at least one art student per semester would plunge.

Continued here (The Weekly Standard, dated 22 August 2009)

Twittering the Constitution

2009-07-20T08:21:00.001-04:00

I will Twitter the Constitution of the United States of America. And the Bill of Rights. You may well ask, why? The Constitution is readily available, in print and online, set down in full without the distraction or annoyance of abridgments, elisions, abbreviations, acronyms, emoticons, and constructions such as "i h8 u" to express our feeling about inherited nobility once it had ceased to be our BFF. The Constitution is there for everyone to read. Ah, reading. People just don't do much of that these days. Especially not kids. Of course today's young people are able to read (thanks to No Child Left Behind and other brilliant improvements in public education). But I see no evidence that youths actually do read anything except text messages. Thus my project. Tech-savvy parents can use their BlackBerry phones to send the 140-characters-or-less items of cyberspeak that I have prepared and thereby fill their children's minds with substantive tweets.

"Tweet" is what I mean, isn't it? I'm not a tech-savvy parent. I communicate with my children via the old-media format called yelling. I have never Twittered or Tweeted or even Chirped. (I have Quacked, but only to lure mallards toward my duck blind.) Excuse me if I don't get the jargon right. Nor am I conversant with all the initialism that adds speed and convenience to typing with one's thumbs. LOL may mean "laughing out loud" or it may mean "lardy, otiose loptopophiles." I'm not sure.

Speaking of clueless squares, I have a second reason for Twittering the Constitution. I understand Twitter has become popular among politicians. This technology allows them to stay in perpetual contact with their constituents. The electorate now has instant information about what politicians have been up to. Considering what Governor Mark Sanford, Senator John Ensign, ex-Governor Eliot Spitzer, et al, have been up to, is this a good thing? And imagine the embarrassment of the Sarah Palin Twitter feed letting everyone in America know what she's been doing when she herself hasn't the slightest. She has to consult her own Tweets.

Giving politicians a Twitter-ready version of the U.S. Constitution to send to voters in place of the politicians' own thoughts will raise the tone of America's political discourse while sparing us the pain and humiliation of learning anything more about our dreadful elected representatives, their idiot ideas, or their unwelcome whereabouts.

Continued here (The Weekly Standard, dated 20 July 2009)

Manifesto for Banana Republicans

2009-06-01T08:23:00.000-04:00

The other day a journalist friend of mine in Washington got a phone call from a colleague in South America. "How's it feel to be a fellow citizen of the Third World?" my friend's friend asked.

"What?" said my friend.

"You know," said the Latin reporter, "the new government gets in office, the old government goes to jail."

The caller was referring, of course, to the prosecution--or threatened prosecution or mooted prosecution or proposal for prosecution to be publicly disavowed but tacitly permitted to go forward--of six Bush administration officials involved with the legal issues concerning "enhanced interrogation techniques."

Note that Attorney General Eric Holder and assorted Obama allies and ilk have been picking on people of whom you've mostly never heard. Aside from former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, it is unknown notables who are suffering besmirchment, sabotage, shredding, and wreckage of their characters, careers, reputations, and personal lives. John Yoo was a lawyer at the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. Jay Bybee was in charge of that office. Douglas Feith was an undersecretary of defense. William Haynes was the Defense Department's general counsel. And David Addington was the vice president's chief of staff.

The targets of calumny do not include any people who actually employed enhanced interrogation techniques. No CIA agents or agency contractors are on the black list. Of course not. It's beneath the dignity of Dianne Feinstein to have to get down on her knees every morning and look under her Prius to see if there's an IED from The Firm.

Nor has there been proscription of the political leaders who decreed how Guantánamo miscreants and associate miscreants were to be questioned. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney aren't threatened with legal action, not even by lunatic Iberian jurist Balthasar Garzón. (I received a post-cocktail hour email from a redneck pal: "Hope Don Greaser tries to serve the subpoenas in person. Body mount of Spanish judge in full plumage sure would dress up my game room.")

Indicting the top members of the ousted Republican government would attract attention from the wrong people--regular people. Public opinionmakers are vehement in their fastidiously ethical support of the Democratic party's stand on anti-cruelty to terrorists. Public opinion is not so certain. Broad polling might uncover opinions to the effect of, "Water-boarding? What's with water-boarding. How about kerosene-boarding!"

Continued here (The Weekly Standard, dated 1 June 2009)

The End of the Affair

2009-05-30T15:08:00.001-04:00

The phrase “bankrupt General Motors,” which we expect to hear uttered on Monday, leaves Americans my age in economic shock. The words are as melodramatic as “Mom’s nude photos.” And, indeed, if we want to understand what doomed the American automobile, we should give up on economics and turn to melodrama.

Politicians, journalists, financial analysts and other purveyors of banality have been looking at cars as if a convertible were a business. Fire the MBAs and hire a poet. The fate of Detroit isn’t a matter of financial crisis, foreign competition, corporate greed, union intransigence, energy costs or measuring the shoe size of the footprints in the carbon. It’s a tragic romance—unleashed passions, titanic clashes, lost love and wild horses.

Foremost are the horses. Cars can’t be comprehended without them. A hundred and some years ago Rudyard Kipling wrote “The Ballad of the King’s Jest,” in which an Afghan tribesman avers: Four things greater than all things are,—Women and Horses and Power and War.

Insert another “power” after the horse and the verse was as true in the suburbs of my 1950s boyhood as it was in the Khyber Pass.

Horsepower is not a quaint leftover of linguistics or a vague metaphoric anachronism. James Watt, father of the steam engine and progenitor of the industrial revolution, lacked a measurement for the movement of weight over distance in time—what we call energy. (What we call energy wasn’t even an intellectual concept in the late 18th century—in case you think the recent collapse of global capitalism was history’s most transformative moment.) Mr. Watt did research using draft animals and found that, under optimal conditions, a dray horse could lift 33,000 pounds one foot off the ground in one minute. Mr. Watt—the eponymous watt not yet existing—called this unit of energy “1 horse-power.”

In 1970 a Pontiac GTO (may the brand name rest in peace) had horsepower to the number of 370. In the time of one minute, for the space of one foot, it could move 12,210,000 pounds. And it could move those pounds down every foot of every mile of all the roads to the ends of the earth for every minute of every hour until the driver nodded off at the wheel. Forty years ago the pimply kid down the block, using $3,500 in saved-up soda-jerking money, procured might and main beyond the wildest dreams of Genghis Khan, whose hordes went forth to pillage mounted upon less oomph than is in a modern leaf blower.

Horses and horsepower alike are about status and being cool. A knight in ancient Rome was bluntly called “guy on horseback,” Equesitis. Chevalier means the same, as does Cavalier. Lose the capitalization and the dictionary says, “insouciant and debonair; marked by a lofty disregard of others’ interests, rights, or feelings; high-handed and arrogant and supercilious.” How cool is that? Then there are cowboys—always cool—and the U.S. cavalry that coolly comes to their rescue plus the proverbially cool-handed “Man on Horseback” to whom we turn in troubled times.

Continue here (Wall Street Journal, dated 30 May 2009)

Interview: O'Rourke on Australian Radio

2009-04-20T15:12:00.003-04:00

PJ O'Rourke maintains that the writings of Adam Smith are still important, especially his lesser known work The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which shows why enlightened self-interest does not equate to selfishness.

Interviewer Paul Comrie-Thomson also questions PJ about classic American cars, rock and roll, and the European adulation of Barack Obama.

Continue here (Transcript of original broadcast on ABC Radio National's Counterpoint on 20 April 2009)

Print paupers could use bailout

2008-12-11T15:04:00.000-05:00

HELLO? Bailout people? Mr Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson? Aren't you forgetting somebody? Like me? I'm a print journalist. Talk about financial meltdown! Print journalists may soon have to send their kids to public schools, feed dry food to their cats and give up their leases on Prius automobiles and get the Hummers that are being offered at such deep discounts these days.

The print journalism industry is taking a beating, circling the drain, running on fumes. Especially running on fumes. You could smell Frank Rich all the way to Nome when Sarah Palin was nominated. Not that print journalism actually emits much in the way of greenhouse gases. We have an itty-bitty carbon footprint. We're earth-friendly. The press run of an average big-city daily newspaper can be made from one tree. Compare that to the global warming hot air produced by talk radio, cable television and Andrew Sullivan.

There are many compelling reasons to save America's print journalism. And I'll think of some while the waiter brings me another drink. In the first place, one out of three American households is dependent on print journalism.* And if you think home foreclosures are disruptive to American society, imagine what would happen if USA Today stopped publishing. Lose your home and you become homeless: a member of an important interest group with many respected advocates and a powerful political lobbying arm. But lose your newspaper and what are you going to do for covers on a cold night while you're sleeping on a park bench? Try blanketing yourself with Matt Drudge to keep warm.

The Government is bailing out Wall Street for being evil and the car companies for being stupid. But print journalism brings you Paul Krugman and Anna Quindlen. Also, in 1898 Joseph Pulitzer of the New York World and William Randolph Hearst of the New York Journal started the Spanish-American War. All of the Lehman Brothers put together couldn't cause as much evil stupidity as that.

Continue here (The Australian, dated 11 December 2008)

Future Schlock

2008-12-01T08:27:00.000-05:00

More than half a century ago, Disneyland opened its House of the Future attraction. I was 10, and I was attracted. In fact, I was in love.

The Tomorrowland dwelling had a cruciform floor plan, a more elegant solution to bringing light and air into a “machine for living” than Le Corbusier had been able to devise. Each side of each arm of the cross was glazed, sill to ceiling. The mullions and rails between the panes were as pleasingly orchestrated as Mondrian’s black stripes.

All the proportions were pleasing. They seemed to adhere to what the ancient Greeks called the “divine proportion,” roughly eight to five. It is the ratio that governs the shape of the galaxies, the Fibonacci sequence, the spiral of the nautilus shell, and the Parthenon’s configuration, and it generated a little piece of Disneyland circa 1957.

Of course, at 10, my critique of the House of the Future was, “It’s neat.” But, within the limits of childish understanding, I would have tried to explain. I was an architecture fan like my friends were sports fans, and a big Frank Lloyd Wright Prairie School booster. And I couldn’t help but boo the diluted, piddle-colored brick version of the International Style that filled the construction sites of my childhood. The only way you could tell a shopping center from a grade school from a minimum-security prison was by the amount of floodlighting and fence wire involved.

Disney’s House of the Future had the clean simplicity prized in the 1950s as relief from decades of frayed patchwork, jury-rigging, and make-do clutter caused by Depression and war. But the spare white form had been warmed with curves. Each quadrant was a streamlined seamed pod, a crossbreed: half jet fuselage, half legume. And, as with an airplane or a beanstalk, the structure rose aloft, flying on a plinth above its house lot.

The House of the Future was sponsored by the Monsanto Company and designed by Marvin Goody and Richard Hamilton from the MIT architecture department. They were prescient in various unimportant ways: the residence contained cordless phones; a flat-screen, wall-sized TV; and a somewhat sinister-sounding device called a “microwave oven.”

The most futuristic aspect of the House of the Future was that it was made almost entirely of plastic. At the time, plastic still enjoyed the benefit of its definition (2a) in Merriam-Webster’s: “capable of being molded and shaped”—into anything you wanted! Plastic was the stuff that didn’t rust or rot or break when you dropped it. Thanks to plastic and a little glue, the clumsiest kid (me) could build splendidly detailed models of Mars passenger rockets and atomic-powered automobiles and many other things that would never be realized. We were a decade away from The Graduate scene that made the word an epithet. I, for one, think Dustin Hoffman should have taken the onscreen career advice he was given, sparing us such later gems as Ishtar, Rain Man, and Outbreak.

Instead, in 1967, it was Disney’s House of the Future that came to an abrupt end. Or not-so-abrupt. Reports have it that a wrecking ball merely bounced on the sturdy polymer seed cases, and the prematurely postmodernist structure had to be sawed apart by hand. (As many a timorous would-be suicide has discovered—with viselike grip on bridge railing—the future is harder to get rid of than you’d think.)

Tomorrowland survived being homeless. But it lost its zest. Walt had died in 1966, and Disney Inc. was deprived of his instinct for America’s flights of fancy.

Nothing speaks of living in the present like getting a complete makeover, which Tomorrowland endured in 1998. Disney, displaying one of the greatest absences of irony on record, gave Tomorrowland a “retro” theme.

Disney’s press release called the new Tomorrowland “a classic future environment.” This explains the Astro Orbitor ride, built in a style that might be called “Jules Vernacular,” with lots of exposed rivet heads and rockets with nose cones shaped like the Eiffel Tower. “Classic future” also excuses the Chevron-sponsored Autopia, a holdover from the Tomorrowland of yore, where tourists can drive on a “superhighway”—with divided lanes!—in small fiberglass imitations of the dream cars at auto shows when Ike was in office.

Continued here (The Atlantic, dated December 2008)

We Blew It

2008-11-17T14:50:00.002-05:00

Let us bend over and kiss our ass goodbye. Our 28-year conservative opportunity to fix the moral and practical boundaries of government is gone--gone with the bear market and the Bear Stearns and the bear that's headed off to do you-know-what in the woods on our philosophy.
An entire generation has been born, grown up, and had families of its own since Ronald Reagan was elected. And where is the world we promised these children of the Conservative Age? Where is this land of freedom and responsibility, knowledge, opportunity, accomplishment, honor, truth, trust, and one boring hour each week spent in itchy clothes at church, synagogue, or mosque? It lies in ruins at our feet, as well it might, since we ourselves kicked the shining city upon a hill into dust and rubble. The progeny of the Reagan Revolution will live instead in the universe that revolves around Hyde Park.

Mind you, they won't live in Hyde Park. Those leafy precincts will be reserved for the micromanagers and macro-apparatchiks of liberalism--for Secretary of the Department of Peace Bill Ayers and Secretary of the Department of Fairness Bernardine Dohrn. The formerly independent citizens of our previously self-governed nation will live, as I said, around Hyde Park. They will make what homes they can in the physical, ethical, and intellectual slums of the South Side of Chicago.

The South Side of Chicago is what everyplace in America will be once the Democratic administration and filibuster-resistant Democratic Congress have tackled global warming, sustainability, green alternatives to coal and oil, subprime mortgage foreclosures, consumer protection, business oversight, financial regulation, health care reform, taxes on the "rich," and urban sprawl. The Democrats will have plenty of time to do all this because conservatism, if it is ever reborn, will not come again in the lifetime of anyone old enough to be rounded up by ACORN and shipped to the polling booths.

None of this is the fault of the left.

Continue here (The Weekly Standard, dated 17 November 2008)

Give me liberty and give me death

2008-09-28T08:26:00.000-04:00

I looked death in the face. All right, I didn't. I glimpsed him in a crowd. I've been diagnosed with cancer, of a very treatable kind. I'm told I have a 95% chance of survival. Come to think of it -- as a drinking, smoking, saturated-fat hound -- my chance of survival has been improved by cancer.

I still cursed God, as we all do when we get bad news and pain. Not even the most faith-impaired among us shouts: "Damn quantum mechanics!" "Damn organic chemistry!" "Damn chaos and coincidence!"

I believe in God. God created the world. Obviously pain had to be included in God's plan. Otherwise we'd never learn that our actions have consequences. Our cave-person ancestors, finding fire warm, would conclude that curling up to sleep in the middle of the flames would be even warmer. Cave bears would dine on roast ancestor, and we'd never get any bad news and pain because we wouldn't be here.

But God, Sir, in Your manner of teaching us about life's consequential nature, isn't death a bit ... um ... extreme, pedagogically speaking? I know the lesson that we're studying is difficult. But dying is more homework than I was counting on. Also, it kind of messes up my vacation planning. Can we talk after class? Maybe if I did something for extra credit?

Why can't death -- if we must have it -- be always glorious, as in "The Iliad"? Of course death continues to be so, sometimes, with heroes in Fallouja and Kandahar. But nowadays, death more often comes drooling on the toilet seat in the nursing home, or bleeding under the crushed roof of a teen-driven SUV, or breathless in a deluxe hotel suite filled with empty drug bottles and a minor public figure whose celebrity expiration date has passed.

I have, of all the inglorious things, a malignant hemorrhoid. What color bracelet does one wear for that? And where does one wear it? And what slogan is apropos? Perhaps that slogan can be sewn in needlepoint around the ruffle on a cover for my embarrassing little doughnut buttocks pillow.

Continued here (Los Angeles Times, dated 28 September 2008)

The Cleveland of Asia: A Journey Through China’s Rust Belt

2008-03-01T08:29:00.000-05:00

For years I’ve been active in Freedom House, the oldest of the private organizations advocating for international freedom and democracy. We’ve seen progress, especially since 1989. We’ve seen backsliding. And we’ve seen stasis, notably 1.3-billion-persons’-worth of stasis in China. Freedom House rates China as “Not Free.” On a scale of 1 to 7—where 1 is as free as human nature allows and 7 is completely otherwise—China scores 6 on civil liberties and 7 on political rights.

Yet we at Freedom House cannot be exactly right. A mere increase in China’s prosperity must mean that more Chinese have greater wherewithal to exercise some aspects of free will. Certainly the Chinese are more free now than they were during the Great Leap Forward, when millions were constrained by starving to death. And the Chinese are freer to go about their business than they were during the Cultural Revolution, when there was no business to go about.

Freedom and democracy are abstract. Daily life is concrete. This is not to denigrate the importance of the abstract. God himself is abstract, until he strikes us with a bolt of lightning. The monks and nuns of political science may be overwhelmed by abstraction, as are the victims of such abstractions as Mao Thought. But, mercifully, quotidian existence is conducted mostly in the world of things and stuff.

I went to China for a month in 2006 and ended up taking a tour of the world of things and stuff. I didn’t mean to. I was just sightseeing. I’d only been to the mainland once and then only to Shanghai. I wanted to visit the Three Gorges before the new dam turned the Yangtze into a cesspool. I wanted a look at the Terracotta Warriors. And that sort of thing.

I was traveling with old friends from Hong Kong, whom I’ll call Tom and Mai. Tom has spent decades in the mining and metallurgy business. He was breaking ground on an ore-processing plant in Nanjing. He seems to know everyone in China who has anything to do with iron, steel, coal, or beer. And Mai and her brothers owned a company in Hong Kong that brokered textile machinery. When China initiated its “Open Door” economic policy, Mai would take mainland clients to Europe (where they’d encounter their first fork) and arrange for the purchase of used spinning and weaving equipment.

Continued here (World Affairs, dated Spring 2008)

Dear Diary, I Think I'm in Love

2007-12-31T08:30:00.000-05:00

Review of "Journals 1952-2000" by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr:

This is a bad, vain, dull, repulsive book. Don't read it. I didn't.

Oops, have I committed the previous sentence to print? I've just broken the most sacred vow of book reviewers. I've confessed to not reading the book I'm reviewing. Jonathan Yardley will stalk me through the streets armed with his razor-sharp critique. The Library of Congress building will come crashing down upon my head. My career is over. But before I go to my doom, let me try to explain.

You see there was this fellow, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who died early this year and is on his way to being forgotten but who, unfortunately, isn't quite there yet. Schlesinger spent some of his time being a Harvard historian and all of his time kissing the behinds of rich people, famous people, and people who were powerful in the Democratic party. He accomplished only one thing of note. (If you don't count his unfinished, multivolume history of the FDR administration and his A Thousand Days buncombe about JFK, and you certainly shouldn't.)

In 1945, Schlesinger went back in time to retro-behind-kiss Andrew Jackson. He wrote The Age of Jackson, glorifying the ignorant backwoods thug who perpetrated genocide upon the Indians, created the spoils system in Washington, and fathered that bastard political party of rum, rebellion, and Hillary Rodham. The rest of Schlesinger's life was spent engaged in such activities as being a speechwriter for Adlai Stevenson and in doing things even less important than that, if you can imagine any.

So this Schlesinger fellow kept what you and I would call a diary but what, when Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Harvard professor, special assistant to President John F. Kennedy, and winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize (twice each), does it, is called Journals. He scribbles away from 1952 until 2000, producing some 6,000 pages, which his sons Andrew and Stephen--and bless them for it--have condensed. The resulting tome is no thicker than the average skull on the current generation of Kennedys. And honest, I meant to read it all. I did get through the entire first paragraph. Here's an excerpt from it concerning the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner of March 29, 1952:

Continued here (The Weekly Standard, dated 31 December 2007)

Why it's good to come from nowhere

2007-04-13T09:47:00.000-04:00

I GREW UP IN TOLEDO, if up is the word. Northwest Ohio is flat. There isn't much up. The land is so flat that a child from Toledo is under the impression that the direction hills go is down. Sledding is done from street level into creek beds and road cuts. In Toledo people grow out — out to the suburbs, out to the parts of America where the economy is more vigorous, and, all too often, out to a 48-inch waistband. But no Toledoan would ever say that he or she had “out-grown” Toledo. We are too level-headed for that.

Level being the operative term. The world of Toledo is as horizontal as the Great Plains but without the heroic vistas and infinite distances. There is no horizon in Toledo. There are too many trees. Nor do those trees form the sylvan cathedrals of the North Woods. Dutch elm disease took care of that. Toledo's scenery is brushy and unsublime.

This lack of interesting geography should be offset by an exciting mix of cultures and peoples, but it isn't. Toledo is full of Irish, Poles, Hungarians, southern blacks and Appalachian whites. There is a large Jewish community and a large Arab community. There are so many Germans that a boy I knew, Don Eggenschwiler, went all the way through grade school and junior high without being teased about his name. But no matter what races, religions or ethnic groups came to Toledo, within months they had above-ground pools, riding lawnmowers and golf clubs. Toledoans are true Americans, and it is almost impossible to compel true Americans to be diverse.

Like tens of thousands of other Toledoans in the years since the rust belt corroded, I left Toledo. I've lived on the East Coast for 37 years. Yet I've never lost the sense of coming from the middle of nowhere. It's a good sense to have. Fifteen of those 37 years were spent writing about politics in Washington, D.C. Politicians, I've found, do not always know the difference between coming from nowhere and heading there.

People I've met in the East visit Toledo once in a while or, more often, pass through it. They remark on the featurelessness. They say, “It's so flat.” A Toledoan would tell them, “So we can see you coming.” I don't mind Easterners. But they think they're the best and brightest. In my opinion, Easterners have their best and brightest and we Toledoans have ours. Their best and brightest come up with things like FEMA, the budget deficit and Iraq. Our best and brightest start a successful chain of muffler shops. From the East Coast's brightest, we get taxes and chaos. From the brightest of Toledo we get quiet cars.

I may be making Toledo sound dull, and it is. That's a godsend. When a teenager tells you, “There's nothing to do around here. Nothing ever happens,” you know you're in the right historical time and place.

Toledo is better than fun, it's happy. Nothing is more conducive to sadness than taking yourself seriously. And taking yourself seriously is difficult when your baseball team is the Mud Hens. There's not much envy among Toledoans. No matter how successful someone becomes, he's still from Toledo. And no land development pressures or geological barriers have kept Toledo from spreading out in that great leveling of lifestyles that snooty urbanites call suburban sprawl and that Toledoans call space for the rider mower in the garage.

But mostly Toledoans are happy because they are busy. People who live in places where there's nothing to do usually are busy. The Toledo area has 38 public golf courses, and there are all those Dutch elm-diseased leaves to get out of the above-ground pool. It's in places that are overloaded with exotic diversions, like London, Paris and New York, that people sit around doing nothing in restaurants and cafes.

Continue here (Toledo Free Press, dated 13 April 2007)

First Chapter: On "The Wealth of Nations"

2007-01-07T23:26:00.000-05:00

THE WEALTH OF NATIONS IS, without doubt, a book that changed the world. But it has been taking its time. Two hundred thirty-one years after publication, Adam Smith's practical truths are only beginning to be absorbed in full. And where practical truths are most important-amid counsels of the European Union, World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, British Parliament, and American Congress-the lessons of Adam Smith end up as often sunk as sinking in.

Adam Smith's Simple Principles. Smith illuminated the mystery of economics in one flash: "Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production." There is no mystery. Smith took the meta out of the physics. Economics is our livelihood and just that.

The Wealth of Nations argues three basic principles and, by plain thinking and plentiful examples, proves them. Even intellectuals should have no trouble understanding Smith's ideas. Economic progress depends upon a trinity of individual prerogatives: pursuit of self-interest, division of labor, and freedom of trade.

There is nothing inherently wrong with the pursuit of self-interest. That was Smith's best insight. To a twenty-first-century reader this hardly sounds like news. Or, rather, it sounds like everything that's in the news. These days, altruism itself is proclaimed at the top of the altruist's lungs. Certainly it's of interest to the self to be a celebrity. Bob Geldof has found a way to remain one. But for most of history, wisdom, beliefs, and mores demanded subjugation of ego, bridling of aspiration, and sacrifice of self (and, per Abraham with Isaac, of family members, if you could catch them).

This meekness, like Adam Smith's production, had an end and purpose. Most people enjoyed no control over their material circumstances or even-if they were slaves or serfs-their material persons. In the doghouse of ancient and medieval existence, asceticism made us feel less like dogs.

But Adam Smith lived in a place and time when ordinary individuals were beginning to have some power to pursue their self-interest. In the chapter "Of the Wages of Labour," in book 1 of The Wealth of Nations, Smith remarked in a tone approaching modern irony, "Is this improvement in the circumstances of the lower ranks of the people to be regarded as an advantage or as an inconveniency to the society?"

If, in the eighteenth century, prosperity was not yet considered a self-evidently good thing for the lower ranks of people, it was because nobody had bothered to ask them. In many places nobody has bothered to ask them yet. But it is never a question of folly, sacrilege, or vulgarity to better our circumstances. The question is how to do it.

The answer is division of labor. It was an obvious answer-except to most of the scholars who had theorized about economics prior to Adam Smith. Division of labor has existed since mankind has. When the original Adam delved and his Eve span, the division of labor may be said to have been painfully obvious. Women endured the agonies of childbirth while men fiddled around in the garden.

The Adam under present consideration was not the first philosopher to notice specialization or to see that divisions are as innate as labors. But Smith was arguably the first to understand the manifold implications of the division of labor. In fact he seems to have invented the term.

The little fellow with the big ideas chips the spear points. The courageous oaf spears the mammoth. And the artistic type does a lovely cave painting of it all. One person makes a thing, and another person makes another thing, and everyone wants everything.

Hence trade. Trade may be theoretically good, or self-sufficiency may be theoretically better, but to even think about such theories is a waste of that intermittently useful specialization, thought. Trade is a fact.

Adam Smith saw that all trades, when freely conducted, are mutually beneficial by definition. A person with this got that, which he wanted more, from a person who wanted this more than that. It may have been a stupid trade. Viewing a cave painting cannot be worth three hundred pounds of mammoth ham. The mutuality may be lopsided. A starving artist gorges himself for months while a courageous oaf of a new art patron stands bemused in the Grotte de Lascaux. And what about that wily spear point chipper? He doubtless took his mammoth slice. But they didn't ask us. It's none of our business.

Continue here (The New York Times, dated 7 January 2007)

O'Rourke interviewed by Joseph Rago

2007-01-06T19:18:00.000-05:00

WHO'S FUNNIER, ON THE WHOLE, liberals or conservatives? It's an old question, but a terrible one. Even to inquire after it reduces the whole curve of human comedy to politics; and besides--sad to contemplate--perhaps the most accurate answer is that they're both humorless. On the liberal side of the register, you can hardly be funny if you're constantly feeling guilty about things; many conservatives meanwhile believe that everything is going to pieces, and there's nothing funny about that.

P.J. O'Rourke, the political satirist, neither hesitates nor hedges. "Conservatives generally tend to be funnier in their private lives," he explains, "because of the hypocrisy factor. I am of course a big fan of hypocrisy, because hypocrites at least know the difference between right and wrong--at any rate, know enough to lie about what they're doing. Liberals are not nearly as hypocritical as conservatives, because they don't know the difference between right and wrong. But anyways the personal lives of conservatives tend to be funnier: They've always got the embarrassing gay daughter, and so on."

In public policy, Mr. O'Rourke claims, "liberals are always much more hilarious. Liberals are always proposing perfectly insane ideas, laws that will make everybody happy, laws that will make everything right, make us live forever, and all be rich. Conservatives are never that stupid. Having conservatives in government is like having a stern talk with your dad in the den about what your allowance will be. . . . Of course, the Republicans always end up giving in: You know, giving you more money than you should have in your pocket, and the keys to the car, and then also a bottle of whiskey."

Continue here (Opinion Journal, 6 January 2007)

From The Editor's Chair

2006-07-23T01:01:00.000-04:00

I WAS OUT ON THE PATIO the other day wondering (as writers of conservative opinion pieces constantly do) what's wrong with America. I noticed a tag affixed to my collapsible canvas deck chair, and my wondering ceased. What's wrong with America was printed on the tag: Do not attempt to lift the front end of the chair while sitting down on it.

Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that chair manufacturers feel compelled to tell Americans this. You'd flip over and whack your head on the concrete. Yet millions of Americans must sit themselves down, spread their knees, grasp their seats, and give themselves a tremendous backwards yank. How else but whacked heads to explain myspace.com, Hillary Clinton's positive poll ratings, US Weekly magazine, or the congressional debate on immigration? I had thought the chairs in the House of Representatives were firmly attached to the floor. Apparently not.

The tag continued with other stern admonishments to avoid obvious dangers: Do not stand on this product. Do not sit on the back support or arm support of this product.

It's a cheap, flimsy collapsible chair. Standing on it would be like standing on moral principle while voicing the Democratic party position on Iraq. The "back support" is a thin sheet of cloth. The "arm support" is likewise. Cautioning Americans against sitting on them is as pathetic - and probably as necessary - as cautioning Americans against sitting Jeffrey Skilling on a corporate board.

I was on the edge of my seat guessing what mindless American behavior the tag would warn of next. Do not sit on the edge of seat.

Furthermore the tag declared: Be careful not to trap fingers when folding.

Also: Weight limit of this chair is 240 lbs.

If current body mass index trends continue, everyone in America over the age of six will be enjoined from relaxing on my patio. The company that makes this chair is announcing that Americans are too fat and stupid for furniture. The company is, of course, Chinese.

That perhaps explains the awkward phrasing in another warning: Keep clear of all obstacle children, people when folding and unfolding this product.

I take the point, people - especially you two-career yuppie couple people who are setting the tone in America today. You have your busy professional and social schedules plus your need for time for yourselves so you can practice yoga, attend An Inconvenient Truth screenings, and grow as persons. What should we call your one (or occasionally two) offspring except "obstacle children"? The nannies, the daycare, the preschools, the tutoring, the lessons and classes and play groups to which you subject your kids certainly indicate a desire to keep clear of them.

I assumed that the tag had a legal reason for existence. Doubtless, even with America's ridiculous liability laws, a company can avoid some trial lawyer depredations by publishing every conceivable risk entailed in using what it sells. I got out the cell phone that I feel compelled to carry even while lolling in the backyard (another thing that's wrong with America) and called a law firm specializing in such matters. I told the receptionist at O'Shyster, Tortberg and Scammington that I seemed likely to be injured by a folding chair ...

Continue here (The Weekly Standard, dated 31 July 2006).

Adan Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments: essential companion to The Wealth of Nations

2006-07-09T06:14:00.000-04:00

AS USUAL, FREE ENTERPRISE is under attack. Assaults on laissez-faire are being made by petro-commie Hugo Chávez, by the EU's dirigisme regime, by Vladimir Putin's reassertion of nationalism and socialism - call it National Socialism? - in Russia. Congress thought Dubai had bought Newark and was going to move it to the Persian Gulf. The Treasury Department is having a neo-mercantilist fit over the current acc ount deficit with China. And President Bush, in his last State of the Union address, made the shameful statement that "America is addicted to oil."

But Americans don't get sick and shaky when they're deprived of oil; they get sick and shaky when they pay for it. And the price they pay is artificially inflated by our government's taxes, acquiescence to a monopoly cartel, and restrictions on exploration, drilling, and refinery construction.

The world's political leaders need to be frog-marched back to The Wealth of Nations for a refresher course. The principles therein are straightforward enough. Even politicians should be able to grasp them. Economic growth depends on division of labor. Division of labor depends on freedom of trade. Freedom of trade depends on, in the words of Adam Smith, "the obvious and simple system of natural liberty."

What politicians are incapable of comprehending is the moral underpinning of free enterprise, that "system of natural liberty." Even many of free enterprise's advocates see market freedoms solely in terms of practical economics. The government of China comes to mind. But Adam Smith was not an economist. The discipline hadn't been invented. Adam Smith was a moral philosopher.

The Wealth of Nations was part of a larger enterprise in moral philosophy. The first installment of Adam Smith's great undertaking was The Theory of Moral Sentiments, published 17 years before Wealth. Smith finished an extensive revision of Moral Sentiments the year before he died. He considered it his most important work. The book is not much read or referred to nowadays, but his theories in The Wealth of Nations cannot be understood without The Theory of Moral Sentiments ...

Continue here (The Weekly Standard, dated 17 July 2006).

Trading with the Enemy? China wants to sell to us. We should be happy!

2006-05-29T06:24:00.000-04:00

I JUST GOT BACK from three weeks in China. So I'm a China expert--by Bush administration standards. Of course, by Bush administration standards, I'm an expert on Iraq strategy, Social Security privatization, and hurricane relief. But even a fellow with a Bush administration level of expertise can take a quick trip to the Mainland and see that America's China policy is ignorant. In the great American tradition of foreign policy bipartisanship, it's stupid too. Howard Dean thinks Hu Jintao wants to steal all of America's jobs and industries. And George Bush can't figure out why his speechwriters keep making him ask, "Who Jintao?" He knows the guy, he just met with him.

The problem with America's China policy is not ideological. True, there is the difficulty of dealing with a single-party state where the entire governmental apparatus is under the control of a small, doctrinaire political elite. But the Republicans are going to lose the House this fall. The problem is that America is wrong about economic principles. And not fancy economic principles such as Income Velocity of Money, which caused some of us to get a D on our Econ 101 midterm. America is wrong about economic principles so basic that even a doddering old Commie with a high school education like Deng Xiaoping understood them.

Economic progress requires division of labor, freedom of trade, and pursuit of self-interest. One person produces one sort of thing - a sack of rice, perhaps. Another person produces another sort of thing - transformation to an ownership society, maybe.

Being self-interested, both people want both things, so they trade. The trade may not be a wise one. When Americans traded their rice sack of votes for George Bush's transformation to an ownership society, they got bungled pension and Medicare reforms and a 2006 budget deficit equal to 80 percent of the Chinese government's annual budget. But freedom of trade must be allowed. Taking the sack of rice by force destroys the pursuit of self-interest, which destroys the division of labor, which keeps anybody from doing anything about economic progress. The best minds of the nation join the Red Guards and run wild through the countryside trying to grow rice with Mao Thought while the fat, crazy peasant who had those thoughts in the first place controls the nation's minds.

Trapped in the theater of Maoism, the Chinese finally noticed the emergency exit marked "Adam Smith." China's economy barged though Deng Xiaoping's Open Door. The door smacked American policymakers in the head and they've been wandering around in a daze mumbling nonsense about the unfairness of our trade deficit with China ever since ...

Continue here (The Weekly Standard, dated 29 May 2006).

Laugh Riot : Fun and games in Europe

2006-02-11T15:55:00.000-05:00

I AM JUST NOW CHOPPING up my Danish modern coffee table and throwing the pieces into the fireplace. I want to show my support for Muslims outraged by publication of Prophet Muhammad caricatures in Denmark's Jyllands-Posten newspaper. All over the Muslim world there are riots and boycotts of Danish products. And I join the Muslims in solidarity (although, come on, you're Muslims, you shouldn't be drinking Carlsberg anyway). Next into the flames go my kids' Legos, invented in Denmark. They'll be followed by the satisfying smash of my wife's Royal Copenhagen dinner plates.

I haven't actually looked at the satirical drawings. Mainstream American media, recognizing that the First Amendment encompasses the right to shut up, have left them unpublished. I guess I could find them on the Internet except our computer was attached to Bang & Olufsen speakers. I seem to have crashed the system while yanking wires. But I'm sure these depictions of Muhammad will infuriate me as much as they infuriate Muslims, if for somewhat different reasons. The cartoons are badly drawn and not very funny. I know that sight unseen, because the cartoons are European.

I feel sorry for the angry mobs setting fire to the embassies. They should at least have gotten a good chuckle before they set out with their matches and gas cans. However, on a personal and professional note, I want to thank the angry mobs for showing up. I've put in some time as a satirist myself. It is the fondest dream of every wiseacre ...

Continue here (The Weekly Standard, 11 February 2006).

I'd love to hear a politician say: 'We'll get the second-best minds together on this'

2005-11-13T00:07:00.000-05:00

THE BRITISH CONSERVATIVE Party is looking for a saviour, which is understandable - it needs one. But can either of the two Davids, Cameron or Davis, save the Tories? Personally, I'm a Davis man. He's my kind of guy. He's the one who educated himself. It doesn't take much to do what Cameron did, which is to get a good education at the best private school in the country. Davis managed to get himself educated at a lousy state school. That takes commitment.

Cameron appeared on Today and answered the usual question about what he was going to do about some terrible social problem with: "We're going to bring the best minds to solve this one." That was the moment when he lost me. The guy obviously doesn't understand the fundamental truth about politics, which is that the best minds only produce disasters. Scientists, for example, are famously idiots when it comes to politics. I agree with Friedrich Hayek, who said in The Road to Serfdom that the "worst imaginable world would be one in which the leading expert in each field had total control over it".

Just once, I'd love to hear a politician say: "We're going to bring the second-best minds together to work on this." The second-best minds are all much more practical people than the first-class guys. More importantly, they are not going to try to do anything very much. They'll fix lunch or take the dog for a walk before they get on to pressing political problems of the day - and by the time lunch is over, it's time to take the dog for another walk and prepare dinner. That's the right order of political priorities. The greatest danger in politics is people who try to do things.

The Conservative Party used to be the party of not doing very much, or at most of only doing things which scaled back government programmes. Conservatives wanted to take government out of people's lives and reduce how much government took from their pockets. But recently, under the influence of Tony Blair, they have started saying that they're no longer the party of cutting back on government: they're really the party of using government to give people things.

This is a mistake.

Continue here (The Telegraph, 13 November 2005).

Two, Three, Many Katrinas ...

2005-10-02T13:04:00.000-04:00

Chief among the marvelous qualities of liberalism is its ability to see the good in human suffering--and make a good thing of it. How like the early Christians, if the early Christians had been in politics.

Hurricane Katrina was a blessing to liberals, a consecrated opportunity to make advocates of small government look small, to enlarge largess with a public dole of private goods, to expand the elemental purview of politics to include earth, water, air, and (with gas at $3) fire, and to shrink the reputation of a despised president.

Hurricane Rita, with its sensible actions by state and city officials, orderly evacuations, lack of looting and minimal loss of life, was not a blessing. One's heart went out to liberals, watching their disappointment as Rita failed to destroy Galveston, flood Houston, or wipe Crawford off the map. How can liberals make sure that America never experiences another Rita?

Onward and upward is the maxim of the politically progressive. Liberals need to go straight to the top if they want more Katrina disasters. Where conservatives perceive only molehills of individual responsibility, liberals can make mountains of government accountability. Disasters are fostered by moving the responsibility for things up and away, as far from the things themselves as possible. Look what the Soviet Union's Himalaya of a government was able to do with atomic power at Chernobyl.

To elevate government, add layers of bureaucracy. Bush's creation of the Department of Homeland Security helped ensure FEMA's high-altitude performance--cold, remote, and oxygen-deprived. But FEMA, it must be proudly remembered, was a brainchild of the Carter administration ... Continue here (The Weekly Standard, 10 October 2005).

My E.U. vacation

2005-06-13T13:19:00.000-04:00

What I learned reading the European constitution on a French beach in the Caribbean:

Guadeloupe

The French referendum on the E.U. constitution was a story that demanded to be viewed and understood from a thoroughly European perspective, so I went on vacation. Guadeloupe, in the Caribbean, is a full-fledged departement of France. Here the European Union could be contemplated as the socio-politico-economic masterwork of a civilization, an edifice of human hope. And never mind that previous attempts to unify Europe by Hitler, Napoleon, and Attila the Hun didn't work out, it had been a cold, rainy spring in New England.

At passport control there were two lines. One official sat complacently in a booth doing nothing until all the E.U. citizens had been processed at another booth by a second official who, in turn, sat complacently doing nothing until the first official had finished. When, at last, the first official examined a non-E.U. passport he walked across the aisle to the second official's booth, borrowed the visa stamp, walked back, stamped the passport, and returned the stamp to his colleague. He did the same thing for each subsequent passport. At Customs, on the other hand, there were no officials.

All around the island billboards read "OUI" or "NON." They were equal in number and identical in color and typography. The fairness doctrine debates of America must have hit home in the E.U. Obviously rigorous, uniform rules on campaign media had been instituted. I mentally composed several indignant paragraphs about how John McCain will be advocating this soon in the United States before I noticed the billboards were advertising a cell phone company. Say "NON" to service charges, "OUI" to free minutes.

Real pro and con referendum posters had to be looked for. They were on special hoardings outside of schools and municipal offices where pasting up of expressions of free speech was officially sanctioned. Campaign rhetoric had a certain subtle, European sophistication. At least I guess so. The slogan on one "Oui" poster was "L'Europe--a besoin de notre."

According to the dictionary I bought for high school French, this translates as "The Europe--to, at, in, on, by or for need, want or necessity of ours." Continue here (The Weekly Standard, 13 June 2005).

Here's a Tax We Can All Agree On

2005-05-30T11:52:00.000-04:00

The greatest pleasure of running a country (although no politician will admit it) is getting to tax people. We Republicans decry exactions and imposts and espouse minimal outlay by the sovereign power. But we control all three branches of government. This won't last forever. Let's have some fun while we can. Moreover, the federal deficit is--contrary to all Republican principles--huge. Even the most spending-averse among us wouldn't mind additional revenue.

America's media and entertainment industry has a gross (as it were) revenue of $316.8 billion a year. If we subtract the income derived from worthy journalism and the publishing of serious books, that leaves $316.8 billion. Surely this money can be put to a more socially useful purpose than reportage on the going forth and multiplying of Britney Spears.

What is the least damaging way to tax the media and entertainment industry? The first response that comes to mind is "Who cares?" Everybody in this business hates us except Rupert Murdoch, the Wall Street Journal editorial page editors, and Bruce Willis. Private bills in Congress having to do with Bermuda incorporation can take care of that. Still, we don't want to tax profits. After all we're Republicans. And as that great Republican think tank, the Bible, puts it, "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world and lose" . . . the next election.

An indirect tax is best, being proportional in its effects and producing "flat tax" outcomes. I propose a tax on raw materials. Continue here (The Weekly Standard, 30 May 2005)

Freedom, Responsibility ... and What? Social Security Reform - An Explanation

2005-04-25T11:39:00.000-04:00

Social Security funding, as a plot device, makes for a languidly paced political thriller. The president discovers a ticking time bomb that's been sitting in plain view for seventy years. It must be disarmed, either with mildly risky partial privatization or with somewhat hazardous tax and benefit adjustments. Cut the blue-state wire? Cut the red-state wire? Only thirteen years to decide before Social Security starts paying out more than it takes in. Or thirty-seven years, if you wait until the accumulated surplus in the Social Security Trust Fund runs out. Then the damp squib goes off, giving ever querulous Generation X something else to complain about.

The pundits who deny that the crisis exists are as shrill as the prophets of doom. The liberal economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman claims, "The people who hustled America into a tax cut to eliminate an imaginary budget surplus and a war to eliminate imaginary weapons are now trying another bum's rush. If they succeed, we will dismantle Social Security, a program that is in much better financial shape than the rest of the federal government."

In thirteen years every aspect of the universe can change — ask a thirteen-year-old. And "much better financial shape than the rest of the federal government" is hardly a reassuring statement. But the political side-taking on reforming Social Security is suddenly, urgently bitter. Maybe this is a sign of health (not to mention longevity) in our democratic system. Politics is — once in a while — a forum for serious debate about political philosophy.

The disputation so far ... Continue here [Cato Institute, 25 April 2005]

Mass Transit Hysteria - Take the plunge, save the planet

2005-03-16T11:45:00.000-05:00

The new transportation bill, currently working its way through Congress, will provide more than $52 billion for mass transit. Mass transit is a wonderful thing, all right-thinking people agree. It stops pollution "in its tracks" (a little ecology-conscious light-rail advocacy joke). Mass transit doesn't burn climate-warming, Iraq-war-causing hydrocarbons. Mass transit can operate with nonpolluting sustainable energy sources such as electricity. Electricity can be produced by solar panels, and geothermal generators. Electricity can be produced by right-thinking people themselves, if they talk about it enough near wind farms.

Mass transit helps preserve nature in places like Yellowstone Park, the Everglades and the Arctic wilderness, because mass transit doesn't go there. Mass transit curtails urban sprawl. When you get to the end of the trolley tracks, you may want to move farther out into the suburbs, but you're going to need a lot of rails and ties and Irishmen with pickaxes. Plus there's something romantic about mass transit. Think Tony Bennett singing "Where little cable cars / Climb halfway to the stars." (And people say mass transit doesn't provide flexibility in travel plans!) Or the Kingston Trio and their impassioned protest of the five-cent Boston "T" fare increase, "The Man Who Never Returned." No doubt some lovely songs will be written about the Washington County, Ore., Wilsonville-to-Beaverton commuter rail line to be funded by the new transportation bill.

There are just two problems with mass transit. Nobody uses it, and it costs like hell. Only 4% of Americans take public transportation to work. Even in cities they don't do it. Less than 25% of commuters in the New York metropolitan area use public transportation. Elsewhere it's far less--9.5% in San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose, 1.8% in Dallas-Fort Worth. As for total travel in urban parts of America--all the comings and goings for work, school, shopping, etc.--1.7 % of those trips are made on mass transit. Continue here [Opinion Journal, 16 March 2005]

An Alternative Inaugural Address

2005-01-15T23:18:00.000-05:00

My fellow Americans, I had intended to reach out to all of you and bring a divided nation together. But I changed my mind. America isn't divided by political ethos or ethnic origin. America isn't divided by region or religion. America is divided by jerks. Who wants to bring a bunch of jerks together with the rest of us? Let them stew in Berkeley, Boston, and Ann Arbor.

The media say that I won the election on the strength of moral values. If the other fellow had become president, would the media have said that he won the election on the strength of immoral values? For once the media would have been right.

We are all sinners. But jerks revel in their sins. You can tell by their reaction to the Ten Commandments. Post those Ten Commandments in a courthouse or a statehouse, in a public school or a public park, and the jerks go crazy. Why is that? Christians believe in the Ten Commandments. So do Muslims. Jews, too, obviously. Show the Ten Commandments to Hindus, Buddhists, Confucians, or to people with just good will and common sense and nobody says, "Whoa! That's all wrong!"

But jerks take issue with every one of the Ten Commandments ... Continue here. (The Weekly Standard, Cover Date: 24 January 2005).

Putting Words in the President's Mouth

2004-10-12T13:22:00.000-04:00

Sixteen obvious points that George W. Bush should make during the Wednesday night debate. Continue Here. (Daily Standard, 12 October 2004)

O'Rourke interviewed by Christopher Cox

2004-06-12T11:45:00.000-04:00

P.J. O'Rourke, the Republican Party reptile, has a secret. Last year, the man who never met a liberal he didn't like mocking actually hosted a house party for Howard Dean. Yes, the governor from the boutique state of Vermont stood on the un-P.C. zebra-skin rug of O'Rourke's cigar-scented study and stumped for votes. Continue here. (Boston Herald, 12 June 2004).

America, Recuse Thyself!

2004-05-30T13:15:00.000-04:00

John Kerry says America shouldn't cut and run. George Bush says America mustn't. But we don't have to retreat ignominiously from the war on terrorism and from our other international responsibilities and commitments; we can recuse ourselves. We can explain to the court of global public opinion that, because America possesses the largest economy, the widest network of business relationships, and the only effective military force on earth, we have too great a vested interest in world events to render fair and impartial judgment. Continue Here. (Wall Street Journal, 30 May 2004)

John Kerry's 1986 wimp-out in the Philippines

2004-04-12T13:04:00.000-04:00

I was in the Philippines working on an article for Rolling Stone. The elections proceeded predictably with, as I wrote at the time, "voter-registration records being destroyed, ballot boxes stolen, opposition poll watchers barred from their stations, and army trucks full of 'flying voters' moved from one spot to another." And worse. Continue Here. (Weekly Standard, 12 April 2004).

New York in the 70s

2004-02-01T13:09:00.000-05:00

People taking their clothes off, that was the important part of the 1970s. From 1969 to 1980, everything - art, music, literature, politics and (as we now know from lawsuits against the Catholic Church) religion - involved people takiing their clothes off. Given the clothes of the era, this was the modest alternative. Embarrassment began with people getting dressed. Continue Here. (Foreword, Feierabend Verlag, February 2004)

The Backside of War

2003-12-01T23:11:00.000-05:00

How I saved Iraq's modern art, and other confessions. A noncombatant's diary by P. J. O'Rourke: Why is Iraq so easy to harm and so hard to help? After eight days of war U.S. troops were approaching Karbala, sixty miles from Baghdad. Misery had arrived everywhere. But humanitarian relief had gotten only as far as Safwan and Umm Qasr, just across the border from Kuwait. Continue here. (The Atlantic Monthly, December 2003)

Hillary's History

2003-06-30T11:54:00.000-04:00

If you plan not to read this summer, "Living History" is just the book. Hillary Clinton's new memoir is more than 100,000 pages long. At least I think it is. There are only 562 page numbers, but you know how those Clintons lie. A mere ream of paper could not contain the padding that has gone into this tome. Hillary--with the help of at least six ghostwriters--nails the goose of a manuscript to the barn floor and force-feeds it with lint. Continue Here. (Weekly Standard, 30 June 2003).

Letter From Egypt

2002-09-22T13:41:00.000-04:00

Hatred between Palestinians and Israelis abides. Arab-led Islamic fundamentalism destabilizes nations from Algeria to the Philippines. The threat of terrorist attacks by al Qaeda continues. Also, our car needs gas. It is important to understand Arab culture. Egypt seems a good place to start. Continue Here. (The Atlantic, 22 September 2002)

The Mideast Press Process

2002-04-16T13:17:00.000-04:00

War, unlike politics, can go on without reporters: Israel banned journalists from covering military operations in the West Bank. The Committee to Protect Journalists called this "unacceptable." The International Federation of Journalists stated, "Censorship will not bring peace." Margaret Engel, managing editor of the Freedom Forum's Newseum, said, "It's an outrage." Continue Here. (Wall Street Journal, 16 April 2002).

O’Rourke interviewed by Jessica Ruiz

2000-10-25T22:30:00.000-04:00

In preparation for my interview of the American political satirist P.J. O’Rourke, I poured over stacks of Rolling Stone magazine, reviewed many speeches and articles written by O’Rourke, and whatever I could find that had been written about O’Rourke. For someone who has been a Democrat since before becoming a citizen, I viewed this task with a great deal of skepticism. Of course the man is funny, but I was concerned that all of this Democrat bashing could get old quick. Continue here (pdf. Association of Defense Counsel of Northern California and Nevada)

1997 in Review: O'Rourke, Hitchens, O'Beirne

1999-01-01T13:52:00.000-05:00

When The American Enterprise invited three of the country's most caustic wits to look back over the year 1997, eyes rolled, stilettos flashed, and axes swung all around the table. Conservative humorist P. J. O'Rourke (foreign affairs correspondent for Rolling Stone) was joined by British radical Christopher Hitchens(columnist for The Nation and Vanity Fair) and commentator Kate O'Beirne (Washington editor of National Review). Senior editor Scott Walter supplied the questions. Continue Here. (The American Enterprise, January 1998)

A Message to Redistributionists

1999-01-01T13:35:00.000-05:00

Cato is about ideas. We spend a lot of time talking and thinking about ideas, but not just good ideas. Bad ideas are important, too. In fact, a lot of life operates on bad ideas. And I thought I'd like to talk about a bad idea: closing the global wealth gap. That is a very bad idea. Continue Here. (Cato Institute, 1 May 1997)

The Liberty Manifesto

1999-01-01T13:24:00.000-05:00

The Cato Institute has an unusual political cause -- which is no political cause whatsoever. We are here tonight to dedicate ourselves to that cause, to dedicate ourselves, in other words, to . . . nothing. We have no ideology, no agenda, no catechism, no dialectic, no plan for humanity. We have no "vision thing," as our ex-president would say, or, as our current president would say, we have no Hillary. Continue Here (Cato Institute, 6 May 1993)