P. J. O'Rourke / Cato Institute via Wikimedia Commons
I'm wistfully saddened at the news that P.J. O'Rourke died today — wistful because I always wanted to meet him but never got down to doing something about it.
His writing was the single reason I subscribed to Rolling Stone magazine in my student days at Princeton in the 1980s — a path which introduced me to Gonzo journalism which in turn led me to discover Hunter S. Thompson.
I'm not going to go into his life story as there's enough of that documented elsewhere. I'm just going to briefly quote some of his work.
From How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink
O.K., now say you’ve been on a six-day drunk and you’ve just made a bet that you can back up all the way to Cleveland, plus you’ve got a buddy who’s getting a blow job on the trunk lid. Well, let’s face it — if that’s the way you’re going to act, sooner or later you'll have an accident. This much is true. But that doesn’t mean that you should sit back and just let accidents happen to you. No, you have to go out and cause them yourself... it’s a shame, but a lot of people have the wrong idea about accidents. For one thing they don’t hurt nearly as much as you'd think. That’s because you're in shock and can’t feel pain, or, if you aren’t in shock, you’re dead, and that doesn’t hurt at all so far as we know…
(…which deeply resonates with me — the part about being in shock after an accident and not feeling pain and I've got the scars to prove it.)
From Holidays in Hell where he describes his visit to South Africa in 1986
I’d heard about the sufferings of the blacks in South Africa. I’d heard plenty about the intransigent racists in South Africa. And I’d heard plenty more than enough about the conscientious qualms and ethical inconveniences that beset whites who go to South Africa and feel bad about the suffering blacks and intransigent racists there. But I’d never heard much about the middling sort of ordinary white people with Mazdas to keep Turtle Waxed and child support payments to avoid, the ones who so resemble what most of us see when we brush our teeth. What’s their response to the quagmire of apartheid? How do they cope with the violence and hatred around them? Are they worried? frightened? guilty? bitter? full of conflicting emotions?
I stayed a month in South Africa, traveled five thousand kilometers, talked to hundreds of people and came back with a two-word answer: they’re drunk.
And some random quotes:
"Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys."
"We're told cars are wasteful. Wasteful of what? Oil did a lot of good sitting in the ground for millions of years. We're told cars should be replaced with mass transportation. But it's hard to reach the drive-through window at McDonald's from a speeding train. And we're told cars cause pollution. A hundred years ago city streets were ankle deep in horse excrement. What kind of pollution do you want? Would you rather die of cancer at eighty or typhoid fever at nine?"
"It remains to be seen which program will cause greater societal damage: China's one-child policy or America's one-parent policy."
"Think about last time you were broke ... now how well did it go with spending your way out of it? Did that work?"
I would write more but I'm going to finish re-reading Holidays in Hell.
