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