Parliament of Whores, by P. J. O'Rourke
Wattenberg, Daniel
PJ. O'Rourke is taking conserva- ., tism into the exclusive after-hours clubs of American culture, places conservatives used to get turned away from because they looked too straight: the pages of...
...The first is that's just the kind of guy O'Rourke is: he genuinely felt the man was overworked and underappreciated...
...So it's unfair to say O'Rourke is a prisoner of conservative doctrine in this area—I think he's in its vanguard...
...On drugs, his libertarian and conservative impulses are in conflict...
...O'Rourke exploits this irony to good effect, making the point that we Americans are a particularly faddish and emotional people, and we're damn lucky to have a Supreme Court tostop us from going off half-cocked and outlawing every form of thought and behavior we decide, for a fleeting moment, we don't like: There wouldn't even be any democracy to defend if our every national whim were put into law...
...A congressman has more help than the nine members of his personal staff...
...That's why we—and the solicitor general and William Kunstler—have to take this guff from the Supreme Court...
...But if his adversaries have despaired of making a dent in his literary reputation, they have tried everything else...
...If only congressmen didn't have to spend so much time politicking and raising money and schmoozing lobbyists and mixing with the masses, they would have the repose necessary for the rational, no-preconceptions, Washington Monthly-style policy analysis that is sure to produce wise legislation...
...That's expensive and inefficient and—what's more—it's stealing...
...Hunt's Point is the nadir of O'Rourke's crack-house tour of New York: There are parts of Hunt's Point where the actual majority of the residents are drugged THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1991 37 to the eyes...
...So for him the question becomes, "How do you make it stop...
...It's beyond bleak, because conventional answers, even conventional conservative answers, won't work...
...His new book Parliament of Whores emerged virtually unscathed from the New York Times Book Review and the Washington Post Book World, usually killing fields for conservative intellectuals...
...I can't even remember what my own opinion was on the flag-burning issue, though I remember I had a strong one," O'Rourke writes...
...Unable for now to synthesize them, he has arrived at a compromise: use drugs, conservatively...
...There was an irony at the center of that debate...
...They lived in a four-bedroom house, had a power mower and a Buick, and his sisters spent their time frugging to the Dave Clark Five...
...For neoliberals like Fallows, the size of government is of little importance...
...But congressmen crave power above money, and power they have: no shortstop, not even Ozzie Smith, has the power to subpoena me and then berate me on network TV...
...They listen to us...
...T nteresting: when O'Rourke brings 1 the notebook along, he not only rejects conservative doctrine, he embraces Common Causey/good government/ neoliberal doctrine...
...In the congressional chapter of Par- liament of Whores, entitled "National Busybodies," O'Rourke follows an unnamed congressman on his daily rounds...
...In his view, when O'Rourke takes the trouble to report a story, he confronts realities that clash with his conPARLIAMENT OF WHORES: A LONE HUMORIST ATTEMPTS TO EXPLAIN THE ENTIRE U.S...
...His marriage alone is more integrated than any New Republic editorial meeting...
...He wants a congressman with less legislation to think about...
...Then, leafing through some old and yellowed poverty statistics, he learns that his own family was officially "poor" when he was a teenager in Ohio in the mid-sixties...
...it almost lost her the house...
...But a book about Washington and public policy and ideas will inevitably be more sedate than one about murder and mayhem in the Third World...
...O'Rourke is a writer of exceptionally varied literary gifts, and all of them are on display here: aphoristic wit, a keen eye for detail, a narrative sixth gear, a foolish disregard for his own personal safety, a Menckenesque bullshit-detector, and a heartfelt kind of Dreiser-goes-to-the-South Bronx kind of urban poetry...
...Jack Kemp won't get you there (O'Rourke expounds on the virtues of tenant management and ownership to a tenant in a New Jersey project, and the lady just keeps repeating, "I'm not going for any of that...
...O'Rourke is a non-pandering populist...
...There is less of that in this book than in his Holidays in Hell, and I found myself missing it...
...Writing in the Washington Monthly, neoliberal pundit James Fallows, Washington editor of the Atlantic Monthly, offers a quid pro quo—O'Rourke can have a respectable niche in Washington, D.C., as a thorough and open-minded reporter, if only he will just stop being so funny and so conservative: When he lacks reporting, [O'Rourke] falls back on wisecracks and pat attitudes, and when forced to choose between making a joke and conveying a less snappy truth, he usually goes for the laugh...
...Books like Modern Manners and Republican Party Reptile bore some traces of National Lampoon humor (O'Rourke used to edit it)—stuff one rung up the humor ladder from barfand-booger jokes...
...Here, according to Fallows, O'Rourke repudiates "the official conservative line" that Congress is a "craven and unprincipled body, afraid to do anything except spend other people's money...
...How do you have an income below the poverty line and a life above it...
...19.95 Daniel Wattenberg 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1991 servative assumptions (perhaps this is why there are so few conservative reporters...
...it's about over-legislating...
...The piece is about how the Court defused the momentarily explosive debate about anti-flag burning laws...
...The piece isn't about over-scheduling...
...Poverty Policy: How to Endow Privation" unfolds a familiar argument that poverty is culturally determined—in a dazzlingly original way, and comes to a conclusion that defies not only liberal orthodoxy about poverty but also two different strands of conservative orthodoxy...
...His staff—nine people—is not large, and his pay—$125,100 a year—is fair compensation for his exertions, "less than what a shortstop hitting .197 makes...
...We pay $566,220 a year—less than a dollar apiece—for a congressman and his staff, and in return they listen to us carp and moan and fume and gripe and ask to be given things for free...
...And, having left that Heritage Foundation "Backgrounder" on Congress at home, O'Rourke has successfully "focused on the main problem: the tyranny of the politician's schedule that barely leaves anyone time for two consecutive thoughts...
...T n "Doing the Most Important Kind I of Nothing," O'Rourke plays straight man to those incorrigible cut-ups: the Supreme Court justices...
...O'Rourke is taking conserva- ., tism into the exclusive after-hours clubs of American culture, places conservatives used to get turned away from because they looked too straight: the pages of Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair, the top of the bestseller lists, and the late-night talk shows...
...However, it is less than 10% of what we ask of a congressman...
...O'Rourke marvels at the politician's stamina and buoyancy: Myself, I was completely exhausted by 7:00 and went home, leaving the congressman, 20 years my senior, looking as animated and energetic as a full school bus—shaking hands and trading chat with governors, firemen, ambulance drivers, other congressmen, and even, at one point, his own wife...
...Since O'Rourke has been criticized (Fallows again) for falling back on pat conservative remedies, it's worth asking whether the Angels are a "conservative" answer...
...And it was a world that punished not only anti-social behavior but any deviation from the norm...
...It is like saying, "Because Doc Gooden has never perfected his pickoff move, he has to fall back on 95mile-an-hour sternum-high fastballs and Daniel Wattenberg is a writer for Insight magazine knee-buckling curves in order to get batters out...
...But in the crack neighborhoods people are still wearing whatever they happened to have on at the moment the crack craze hit...
...The old steal from the young, farmers steal from urbanites, the poor steal from the rich (and the not-so-rich), consumers steal from producers (and ultimately other consumers), and, if that doesn't cover everybody, all of us who are alive are stealing from those who haven't yet been born...
...O'Rourke then provides a list of the pieces of legislation that were wending through Congress the week he reported the piece...
...What's missing in the- housing projects and the crack-houses is the Harper Valley PTA...
...It's the best piece in the book...
...Re-election rates being what they are, he enjoys enviable job security...
...But as a limited-government conservative, O'Rourke recognizes that beyond a certain level—long since exceeded by Congress—it's hopeless...
...O'Rourke starts by "proving" statistically that there is no poverty in America: the amount of federal anti-poverty expenditure far exceeds the amount of money it would take to lift every poor person in the country above the poverty line...
...In Parliament of Whores, he is very funny and very conservative—more promilitary than Ed Crane and more pro-sex and -drugs and -rock 'n' roll than Pat Buchanan...
...Then he gives a list of some of the 250 other items on the congressional calendar for that week...
...Neither will Nancy Reagan (O'Rourke quotes Guardian Angels leader Curtis Sliwa: "There's plenty of education...
...Because this is, in the end, what legislators do...
...If you wanted to protect flag-burners, you had to argue that flag-burning was a meaningful, purposeful (and thus truly despicable) expression of hatred for America...
...Of course, O'Rourke is no racist...
...And, while it would be overstating the case to say the O'Rourke family was "Glad All Over," their tidy surroundings were a far cry from the squalor O'Rourke glimpsed on the staircase of a Newark housing project...
...My mom was not guaranteed housing by being a single mother...
...Law-and-order conservatives generally rely on police powers (more arrests, tougher sentences, walking the due-process cat back to 1965) for answers to the drugs/poverty/crime tangle...
...This list of twenty-five disparate items just about reaches "the limit of the human capacity for expertise," he says...
...His humor, too, is evolving into something more cerebral and sophisticated...
...The Guardian Angels are trying to enforce the kind of propriety, the mores, that were usual in American society, at every income level, twenty-five years ago...
...You can't make government work...
...Technique is everything for them, and if they've contrived to give a congressman more time to commune with himself, they figure they've done enough reforming for one day...
...A congressman and his staff are a steal at the price: We Americans have struck a remarkable bargain...
...The left would love to stop this guy quick, but they haven't quite figured out how: his writing talent makes him virtually review-proof...
...The latest challenge to O'Rourke's intellectual integrity and reputation is potentially the most dangerous: co-optation...
...Everybody knows drugs are bad...
...He has committee staff...
...He has subcommittee staff...
...O'Rourke writes: Congress meddles in every part of American life and then some...
...In my opinion, O'Rourke overdramatizes the burdens of a congressman...
...Where I grew up you didn't have a chance to live in poverty...
...Because he has developed a persona that is down-to-earth and self-effacing, he is able to castigate us for our selfishness and indolence without coming across as a high-hatting policy wonk...
...If, on the other hand, you wanted to throw the book at flag-burners, you had to argue that flag-burning was kind of imprecise, didn't really mean much of anything, and hence was not constitutionally protected expression...
...Not an enviable task...
...These vestiges have largely disappeared, and O'Rourke seems to have found a balance that will win him Public Interest readers without alienating his Rolling Stone faithful...
...Weekends, the congressman is back in his district doing more of the same...
...It is a grueling thirteen hours: strategy sessions, hearings, mark-ups, constituent visits, a frantic run-through of legislation with staff, a hurried perusal of outgoing mail, and, finally, two dinners on opposite sides of town...
...But more importantly, he wanted to make a point that recurs throughout the book: that limited government depends on self-government...
...We demand way too much from our leaders and do way too little for ourselves...
...He has the bureaucrats in the executive branch, whom he bosses around as if they were his staff...
...It's probably the best thing I've ever read on poverty...
...But if he lets the congressman off easy, he does so for good reasons...
...you couldn't afford it...
...Then they tried character assassination: a year ago, New Republic deputy editor Andrew Sullivan excoriated him in Esquire as a racist and an opportunist...
...While they aren't opposed to Angels-style community-based action, they have been slow to grasp its importance...
...But modern society has become so lawless and screwy that the Guardian Angels have had to start a street gang to teach people decorum...
...The Guardian Angels call it slamming and jamming...
...This book exposes all of us as thieves...
...I was threatened with loss of my scholarship, expulsion from college, arrest, and maybe even having to find a job...
...Of course, there is poverty, but (and here he follows the conservative line) you can't solve it by throwing money at it...
...Hunt's Point doesn't look much worse than other lousy neighborhoods, but the people do—dirty, skinny, disordered base-heads yelling at each other and us and people who aren't there...
...Fallows praised this passage as an example of O'Rourke at his reportorial best...
...Funny, they never felt poor...
...What O'Rourke wants is not a congressman with more time to think about legislation...
...But in trying to claim this O'Rourke piece for neoliberalism, Fallows is barking up the wrong decision tree...
...The account of the Angels is an example of the high-adventure reporting on wild, violent, unfathomably different places that O'Rourke has made his own...
...Neoliberals, of course, are the salon painters of public policy...
...lime, he makes less than the shortstop hitting .197...
...O'Rourke identifies the x factor: It was a narrow, stuffy, priggish world and deaf to excuses...
...I wasn't given counseling for my drug use or put in a therapy program with sympathetic peers...
...Congressional legislation reaches beyond the grave with estate taxes and back into those clouds of glory Wordsworth says we trail when it touches upon abortion issues...
...A live-in boyfriend would have been out of the question for a woman who worked as a secretary at the board of education and was a member of the Monroe Street Methodist Church...
...GOVERNMENT P. J. O'Rourke/Atlantic Monthly Press/233 pp...
...Happily, O'Rourke has not succumbed to the siren song of co-optation...
...First they tried to dismiss him...
...ocial mores have to be enforced, and in the slums that means the Guardian Angels and "slamming and jamming...
...American slums are usually stylish...
...While I, too, respect O'Rourke's reportorial abilities, this is a deeply retarded statement...
...Introducing his informative and hair-raising account of a Guardian Angels raid, he explains that the Angels are more than bodyguards for little old ladies: What Sliwa and his men intended to do was wreck the crack house—break everything breakable, rough up the patrons and take their drugs and money...
...We have only ourselves to blame if government is too big...
...stroy the permissive atmosphere of the inner city and to provide, by main strength of hand, the social opprobrium missing in the slums...
...We'd sacrifice the whole Constitution for those lost kids on milk cartons one week, and the next week wed toss the Rights of Man out the window to help victims of date rape...
...He was derided as "the Nazi jokester" in the Nation by Alexander Cockburn, a guy who thinks like a Stalinist and dresses like a hippie, making him a rare double anachronism...
...The purpose is to show the flag of decency, to de38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1991...
...for them the key question is, "How do we make government work...
...Neither will Bill Bennett (O'Rourke not only doubts the efficacy of arrests—he even questions whether certain drugs should be illegal...
...Public outrage at the congressional pay grab and the size and cost of their staffs is unfounded...
Vol. 24 • September 1991 • No. 9
