We lost a treasure the other day.
This from Charlie Sykes in the Bulwark
remembering P.J. O'Rourke
"The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it." - P. J. O'Rourke.
P. J. O’Rourke passed away yesterday at the age of 74, which I have come to think of as tragically young.
I already miss him. He still had so much pomposity left to deflate, idiocy to mock, and humbuggery to lampoon. Just look at the material he had to work with.
Make sure you read
JVL’s heart-felt tribute in today’s Bulwark. Our friend, John Podhoretz, remembers P.J. as
America’s greatest satirist and “coolest conservative” (back when that sort of thing was still possible).
His passing after a short illness is devastating, not only because it robs us of his gimlet eye but because it reduces the store of kindness in the world, which is more precious than rubies.
It isn’t an exaggeration to say that P.J. was, for a long time, the only cool conservative writer in America. His pieces for Rolling Stone and Harper’s and other mainstream outlets gamely featured his horrified takes on elite cluelessness and liberal-Puritan malfeasance against ordinary American playful fun.
Politico
describes P.J. as “a prolific author and satirist who re-fashioned the irreverence and ‘Gonzo’ journalism of the 1960s counterculture into a distinctive brand of conservative and libertarian commentary.”
But that hardly seems to do him justice; really, if you haven’t read his stuff, do yourself a favor. Imagine the literary love-child of Hunter S. Thompson and H.L. Mencken… but that also doesn’t really capture him. He was funnier than Mencken and more trenchant than Thompson.
He was, above all, a master satirist and a fearless wordsmith with no tolerance at all for the bullshit of our times. Here’s a sample from his 1991 best-seller, (and one of my favorites) “Parliament of Whores”:
“In July 1988, I covered the specious, entropic, criminally trivial, boring stupid Democratic National Convention, a numb suckhole stuffed with political bulk filler held in that place where bad malls go to die, Atlanta.
“Then ... I flew to that other oleo-high colonic, the Republican convention, an event with the intellectual content of a Guns N’ Roses lyric.”
You can hear echoes of Twain; and there’s definitely a Mencken-esque vibe. But, in the end, it was quintessentially P.J. O’Rourke. And damn, we really needed his humor to get through what he once described as our “era of idiot populism and hooligan partisanship.”
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