Fashionable Worries
O'ROURKE, P.J.
P. J. 0' Rourke Fashionable Worries If meat is murder, are eggs rape? T his is a moment of hope in history. Why doesn't anybody say so? We are no longer in grave danger of the atomic war which,...
...The idea is that people will drop everything for a WWII...
...An article in the May 5, 1994 "Drugs in America" special issue of Rolling Stone said, "Given the psychic condition of the nation today [heroin] may be just what the doctor ordered...
...Sure...
...Freedland was writing a feature piece for the April 24, 1994 Sunday Show section titled "Generation Hex...
...But, in the meantime, we should be enjoying ourselves, and we are not...
...Said the Austrian political economist Friedrich Hayek, in his 1944 book The Road to Serfdom: "There could hardly be a more unbearable—and more irrational—world than one in which the most eminent specialists in each field were allowed to proceed unchecked with the realization of their ideals...
...To quote Malthus again: The most successful supporters of tyranny are without doubt those general declaimers who attribute the distresses of the poor, and almost all the evils to which society is subject, to human institutions and the iniquity of governments...
...Without voting First Ladies, there was no health-care reform...
...We are no longer in grave danger of the atomic war which, for nearly fifty years, threatened to annihilate humanity and otherwise upset everyone's weekend plans...
...And how Jimmy Carter asked Americans to respond to a mere rise in the price of crude oil with "the moral equivalent of war...
...The highest standards of luxury and comfort, as known only to the ridiculously wealthy a few generations ago, would hardly do on a modem white-water rafting trip...
...A veterinarian fired tranquilizer darts at the critter in an effort to get it down...
...Politics is the business of getting power and privilege without possessing merit...
...Wecan't give fifty dollars to the Sierra Club, read Douglas Coupland, and sing the Captain Planet theme song and set everything right...
...The nasty, powerful, and belligerent empire that was the Soviet Union has fallen apart...
...You may have noticed how politicians are wiser, kinder, and more honest than you are...
...Our clothing is more comfortable, our abodes are warmer, better-smelling, and vermin-free...
...Nobody loves me...
...Timothy E. Wirth, nominee for this dreary post, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee...
...Which should cool Lois Lane...
...And "Melrose Place" is in reruns...
...You may have noticed how politicians are wiser, kinder, and more honest than you are...
...Politicians are always searching for some grave alarm that will cause individuals to abandon their separate concerns and prerogatives and act in concert so that politicians can wield the baton...
...Freedland reported that "[Hince] has completed six years of study in molecular biology but is now headed for Alaska to work as a salmon fisherman...
...It wasn't until the tree was chopped down . . . that they discovered they were rescuing a dart-riddled garbage bag...
...And communication is sure...
...Things are better than they were only a few years ago...
...Hince, who is clearly a spokesperson not just for his generation but for all of America and maybe for space aliens...
...Everything was worse forgoing to the movies, and watching TV and not hear this mentioned...
...I am worried about the planet for my daughter's future," announced Kidder in an interview with the Chicago Tribune...
...Everybody's got a squawk...
...And what a tortured cry of existential despair that was when Kurt took a twenty-gauge and splattered his brains, or whatever it was he had in his skull, all over the Cobain guest house...
...And such things as huge federal regulatory agencies and the Menendez jury aren't helping items one through three...
...T he grave worries facing the world today mostly don't have solutions...
...But William T. Vollmann—the youthful author of An Afghanistan Picture Show, Whores for Gloria, Butterfly Stories, and numerous other books (who has been acclaimed a genius by the sort of people who acclaim those things)—knows it will take more than a split-level in the suburbs to redeem our ghastly existences...
...Otherwise Nirvana lead caterwaul Kurt Cobain would still be with us...
...Now we're "fighting pollution," "battling AIDS," "conquering racism," et cetera...
...Greenpeace fund-raisers on the subject of global warming are not much different than tribal wizards on the subject of lunar eclipses...
...Barbie showed us the signs for "Friend," "Hello," "Thanks," and that sort of thing...
...We all know perfectly well we've got no idea what the word means...
...Of course, it's difficult for these youngsters to know if they're going to live as comfortably as their parents did because the kids are so immobilized by despair over ecological ruin, shrinking white-collar job market, and fear of intimacy that they're all still living at home...
...Zoning-board meetings are also a blast...
...The streets of the New World are paved with onions...
...Which is why Episcopalian neighborhoods are always such dumps...
...It's always possible to come down with the mumps on V-J Day or to have, right in the middle of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a piece of it fall on your foot...
...Are we disheartened by the breakup of the family...
...politicians...
...They wish to politicize everything...
...Wecan't give fifty dollars to the Sierra Club, read Douglas Coupland, and sing the Captain Planet theme song and set everything right...
...Or mail them to Washington either...
...Professional worriers put our fears to use...
...Why are we so unhappy...
...Fussed Wirth, "Growth that is all-too-capable of doubling—even tripling—today's global population in the next century is already a force contributing to violent disorder and mass dislocations in resource-poor societies...
...His dyed red hair nearly covers his eyes, falling behind the lenses of his retro, Buddy thought she'd been abducted by creatures from outer space...
...The whole world is rotten...
...The last place on the planet where white supremacy held sway has elected a president of rich, dark hue...
...We can't vote our troubles away...
...And watch out, he may be trying to...
...Property rights, rule of law, responsible government, and universal education: that's all we need...
...Imagine Bill Clinton conducting your love life for you...
...I behold my country in a pet beefing, carping, crabbing, bitching, sniveling, mewling, fretting, yawping, bellyaching, and being pickle-pussed...
...Now we're "fighting pollution," "battling AIDS," "conquering racism," et cetera...
...Men customarily wed multiple wives, not by way of philandering but because of deaths in childbirth...
...And how Jimmy Carter asked Americans to respond to a mere rise in the price of crude oil with "the moral equivalent of war...
...Remember the War on Poverty...
...They wish to politicize everything...
...Hince drinking in one of the Seattle bars where Nirvana got its start...
...Listening to Prozac, by Peter Kramer, spent Holly glasses...
...Such professional worriers as Al Gore, Paul Ehrlich, Jeremy Rifkin, Joycelyn Elders, Barry Commoner, Jesse Jackson, and Captain Planet want our freedom, on the grounds that they are better than us...
...Margot Kidder supplies the voice of "Gaia," the Spirit of the Earth...
...Greenpeace fund-raisers on the subject of global warming are not much different than tribal wizards on the subject of lunar eclipses...
...Things are better than they were only a few years ago...
...Though no society has achieved these perfectly...
...Our Parents Had More" is the title of chapter two...
...We have become a nation of calamity howlers, crêpe hangers, sour guts, and mopes—a land with the grumbles...
...Travel is swift...
...The other great malevolent regime of recent days, Red China, has decided upon conquest of the world's shower flip-flop market as its form of global domination...
...What were we supposed to do, shame the gas station attendant to death...
...But, as I pointed out, that's your problem, not history's...
...They are haters of liberty and loathers of individuals...
...Nowadays we can hardly count our blessings, one of which is surely that we don't have to do all that counting—computers do it for us...
...But many of the fretful—the "multicultural training facilitator" is an appalling example—are pros...
...Life is sweet...
...Imagine Bill Clinton conducting your love life for you...
...Politicians are always searching for some grave alarm that will cause individuals to abandon their separate concerns and prerogatives and act in concert so that politicians can wield the baton...
...To quote Malthus again: The most successful supporters of tyranny are without doubt those general declaimers who attribute the distresses of the poor, and almost all the evils to which society is subject, to human institutions and the iniquity of governments...
...and the next perhaps is that respectability and importance which are given to the lower classes by equal laws, and the possession of some influence in the framing of them...
...36 The American Spectator October 1994 Women couldn't vote, not even incredibly intelligent First Ladies who were their own people and had amazing inner strength plus good luck playing the cattle futures market...
...says the facilitator...
...Of course, there was also no health care...
...Though no society has achieved these perfectly...
...Our own nation is notably lacking on the fourth point...
...Everywhere we see the imposition of grave concern into the most mundane and trivial aspects of life...
...We should wipe the gnostic smirk of self-righteousness off the faces of the moral buttinskis...
...The bullying of fellow citizens by means of dreads and frights has been going on since paleolithic times...
...Everything stinks...
...It was a world in which "nigger" was not a taboo name, but the second half of "Beavis and Butt-Head" would have been...
...This state, those masses, that mankind, and the planet will then be run by...
...The Parliament of the World's Religions, meeting in Chicago in 1993, issued a statement called "Towards a Global Ethic" that opined, "We must move beyond the dominance of greed for power, prestige, money and consumption to make a just and peaceful world...
...The children died, too, sometimes before a suitable foot-long nineteenth-century name could be given them...
...Then the ones who survived would just be so busy getting things together that they'd have to help each other, and in time the world would recover ecologically, too...
...Oh, no, the Night Wolf is eating the Moon Virgin...
...Our lights are brighter...
...Instead we have to accept the undramatic and often extremely boring duties of working hard, exercising self-control, taking care of ourselves, our families, and our neighbors, being kind, and practicing as much private morality as we can stand without popping...
...Going to church was always one of my favorite things to do...
...That is, they don't have solutions outside ourselves...
...Rutherford B. Hayes had quite an eye for beef on the hoof...
...The majority of people were farmers, and do you know what time cows get up in the morning...
...It was Thomas Robert Malthus himself, arguably the father of modern worrying, who set forth these solutions in the 1803 revision of his Essay on the Principle of Population: The first grand requisite to the growth of prudential habits is the perfect security of property...
...The world is an awful place so we're not much good either...
...Personal hygiene was practiced, when at all, on the face, neck, and hands up to the wrists...
...and the most trivial infection might prove fatal...
...Things are better, in fact, than they were at 9:30 this morning, thanks to Tylenol and two Bloody Marys...
...And not much health...
...Masters of Sanctimony have an agenda...
...What were we supposed to do, shame the gas station attendant to death...
...And any peek into the Things are better now than things have been since men began keeping track of things...
...H ere we've got all this material well-being, liberty, and good luck, and we're still our crummy old selves—flabby around the middle, limited out on our VISA cards...
...It was Thomas Robert Malthus himself, arguably the father of modern worrying, who set forth these solutions in the 1803 revision of his Essay on the Principle of Population: The first grand requisite to the growth of prudential habits is the perfect security of property...
...Calls to mortal combat are forever being sounded (though only metaphorically—politicians don't like real wars, too much merit is involved...
...That's the kind of power relationships capitalism creates...
...Bad music, for instance, has gotten much briefer...
...A walk through an old graveyard shows our ancestors often had more dead children than we have live ones...
...Being and creation are so horrible, even heroin can't make them better...
...No doubt it will all come crashing down around our ears one day when a comet hits the earth or Sally Jessy Raphael becomes Chief Justice of the United States...
...And memo to Generation X: Pull your pants up, turn your hat around, and get a job...
...But no...
...Capitalism requires scarcity to function...
...Hanna-Barbera has a "Captain Planet and the Planeteers" cartoon about saving the you-know-what...
...Our food is fresher...
...People really wanted . . . to help and protect that bear and get him where he was supposed to be," Norman Gordan, the owner of the farm said...
...Fretting makes us important...
...The idea is that people will drop everything for a WWII...
...I'll be your server tonight...
...That was his message, that life is futile," a 26-year-old named Bob Hince told Washington Post reporter Jonathan Freedland...
...In case you missed the point (or fell asleep while the plot ossified), Coupland included several pages of depressing statistics at the back of Generation X. For example, accordThe American Spectator October 1994 37 ing to a Time/CNN telephone poll taken in June of 1990, 65 percent of 18-to-29-year-old Americans agree that "given the way things are, it will be much harder for people in my generation to live as comfortably as previous generations...
...Of course, if you're watching a lot of daytime TV your life probably is dreadful...
...W e know the truth of these matters from stories we've heard in our own homes...
...Give me silver and I will make him spit her out...
...Though, like many simple things (faith, grace, love, souffles), they are difficult to achieve...
...A TV revival of "Bonanza" had as its villain a man who wanted to strip-mine the Ponderosa...
...Existence has improved enormously within the lifetimes of our immediate family members...
...Senate (and, if you think Caucasians have any claim to genetic superiority, imagine majoring in U.S...
...The house is a mess...
...hear America whining, crybaby to the world...
...everybody...
...But you could spend a long time reading,media produces examples in plenty of the same sobs and groans, often from improbable Jeremiahs...
...My Grandfather O'Rourke was born in 1877 and born into a pretty awful world, even if we don't credit all of his Irish embroidery upon the horrors...
...Oh, no, the Night Wolf is eating the Moon Virgin...
...And whether these agony merchants are leftists (as they usually are) or rightists (as they certainly can be) or whether they head off in some other and worse direction (the way religious fundamentalists do), the political goal is the same...
...A colossus that stood astride the earth now lies on the floor pounding its fists and kicking its feet, transformed into a fussy-pants and a sputterbudget...
...The average wage was little more than a dollar a day...
...The facilitator, a male, was being paid $2,000 a day...
...He found Mr...
...Things are better now than things have been since men began keeping track of things...
...six months on the New York Times best-seller list...
...To the extent that our worries do have public, collective solutions, the solutions are quite simple...
...Ralph Nader is as much a politician as Senator Robert Packwood, even if Ralph isn't as smooth with the ladies...
...They are haters of liberty and loathers of individuals...
...On the Fourth of July 1993, the lead story on the front page of the Boston Globe read: The country that celebrates its 217th birthday today is free, at peace, relatively prosperous—but deeply anxious...
...Illness was ever-present...
...Everybody hates me...
...Or mail them to Washington either...
...Education is readily available...
...We thoughtlessly drop garbage around our homes, schools, churches, places of work, and places of play...
...Kidder said her daughter had once told her, "Mom, when we grow up, the world may not be here...
...With heroin,' as a former user points out, 'your life can be falling apart around you and everything's still fine with you...
...Coon," "kike," "harp," and "spic" were conversational terms...
...Let us seek out the worries but avoid the worriers...
...the American people are troubled, beset by doubts, full of anger...
...But, as Nirvana would say, "Never mind...
...My mother's mother (from the indoor-plumbing side of the family) said that, when she was little, a hired girl had told her to always wear at least one piece of clothing when washing herself "because a lady never gets completely undressed...
...Apartheid-style racism is now relegated to a few pitiful and insignifiP. J. 0 'Rourke is the author of numerous works and a member of the editorial board of The American Spectator...
...Personally, I think Bob Hince won't have to worry about what he'll be if the people who paid for his six years of studying molecular biology get their hands on him...
...History is on a roll, a toot, a bender...
...Remember the War on Poverty...
...Nobody who ever met my family is...
...This essay is adapted with permission from his new book, All the Trouble in the World: The Lighter Side of Overpopulation, Famine, Ecological Disaster, Ethnic Hatred, Plague, and Poverty, to be published in October by the Atlantic Monthly Press...
...It's just ambivalence,' he says...
...To the extent that our worries do have public, collective solutions, the solutions are quite simple...
...And that suit's going to have to go to the cleaner's...
...cant venues such as the U.S...
...T he April 1994 issue of Washingtonian ran an article by my friend Andrew Ferguson about corporate "multicultural training...
...Colonialism has disappeared, and hence the residents of nearly a quarter of the earth's surface are being spared visits from Princess Di...
...and the next perhaps is that respectability and importance which are given to the lower classes by equal laws, and the possession of some influence in the framing of them...
...We might just as well say we're suffering from yohimbine or rigadoon or Fibonacci sequence...
...The germ theory of disease as argued by Pasteur was just another wacky French idea with no more effect on the people of the 1870s than Deconstructionism has on us...
...Ralph Nader is as much a politician as Senator Robert Packwood, even if Ralph isn't as smooth with the ladies...
...Some of the folks propounding the above-listed anxieties, cavils, and peeves are amateurs: New Agers who will believe in anything but facts, environmentalist softies who think the white rats should be running the cancer labs, or bong-smoke theorists who would have the world be as stupid as they are...
...Everybody wants to save the earth...
...The May 1994 issue of Barbie comics, featuring the adventures of the doll by that name, had a story about how deaf people are discriminated against...
...Wagner's Ring cycle takes four days to perform while "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm" by the Crash Test Dummies lasts little more than three minutes...
...It's built into the system—no scarcity, no profit...
...T he grave worries facing the world today mostly don't have solutions...
...It's not our fault, it's life's...
...Let's give the professional worriers something to worry about...
...I'd say the biggest hope that we have right now is the AIDS epidemic," Vollmann told Michael Coffey in the July 13, 1992 issue of Publishers Weekly...
...Oh those massively dislocated Nova Scotians, breeding like mink...
...Such professional worriers as Al Gore, Paul Ehrlich, Jeremy Rifkin, Joycelyn Elders, Barry Commoner, Jesse Jackson, and Captain Planet want our freedom, on the grounds that they are better than us...
...race, gender, disability, sexual orientation, and the kitchen sink into employees of Washington businesses: "It's a function of capitalism, isn't it...
...nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes...
...Just kidding...
...Politics is the business of getting power and privilege without possessing merit...
...That's if you worked...
...A politician is anyone who asks individuals to surrender part of their liberty—their power and privilege—to State, Masses, Mankind, Planet Earth, or whatever...
...Sewage was considered treated if dumped in a river...
...I behold my country in a pet beefing, carping, crabbing, bitching, sniveling, mewling, fretting, yawping, bellyaching, and being pickle-pussed...
...Give me silver and I will make him spit her out...
...A politician is anyone who asks individuals to surrender part of their liberty—their power and privilege—to State, Masses, Mankind, Planet Earth, or whatever...
...A just and peaceful world full of powerless nobodies who are broke and have empty shopping malls...
...And worrying is less work than doing something to fix the worry...
...What am I supposed to be...
...O'Rourkes were not known to do so...
...Thus, in fin de siecle civilization, we find ourselves with grave, momentous concerns galore...
...Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine...
...Show me somebody with lower expectations than mine...
...But lean over to the person next to you on a subway and say, "How can you smile while innocents are dying in Tibet...
...And because they worry so much, they must be experts, too...
...Other refugees-in-waiting," said Wirth, "press hungrily against the fabric of social and political stability around the world...
...Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine...
...The bad political ideas that have menaced our century—Fascism, Communism, Ted Kennedy for President—are in retreat...
...On Earth Day, 1994, the National Council of Churches suggested that Protestants make a "confession of environmental sins": "We use more than our share of the Earth's resources...
...40 The American Spectator October 1994 there really is only one political goal in the world...
...Property rights, rule of law, responsible government, and universal education: that's all we need...
...Let us seek out the worries but avoid the worriers...
...Blacks could no more vote than women could and were prevented from doing so by more violent means...
...Some of the resulting refugees are our near neighbors...
...politicians...
...In the April 24, 1994 issue of the New York Times Book Review, Fran R. Schumer made reference to "the modern era, when anomie, caused by any number of factors—the decline of religion and community, the anonymity of modern life gave rise to selfish, obsessive, 20th-century man...
...It's worse than that...
...Calls to mortal combat are forever being sounded (though only metaphorically—politicians don't like real wars, too much merit is involved...
...This is especially true if we're careful to pick the biggest possible problems to worry about...
...The special is worms...
...Say you're an adult male and you're skipping down the street whistling "Last Train to Clarksville...
...It's nothing now but a space on the map full of quarreling nationalities with too many ks and zs in their names—armed Scrabble contestants...
...But that's personal and history is general...
...We can't vote our troubles away...
...Andy quoted one of the trainers (or facilitators, as they like to be called), whose job it is to instill "sensitivity" about age...
...Coupland' s first novel, Generation X, was a detailed account of how wretched and lousy life is for middle-class white kids born after 1960...
...Pollution was unchecked and mostly unthought of...
...Because politicians worry so much about overpopulation, famine, ecological disaster, ethnic hatred, plague, and poverty, they must be superior people...
...You'll acquire a reputation for great seriousness and also more room to sit down...
...Said the Austrian political economist Friedrich Hayek, in his 1944 book The Road to Serfdom: "There could hardly be a more unbearable—and more irrational—world than one in which the most eminent specialists in each field were allowed to proceed unchecked with the realization of their ideals...
...Lightning Comics, a Detroit publisher of funny books, has created a super hero, Bloodfire, who is HIV positive...
...All she was doing in the NYTBR was reviewing a book about food...
...Sharing power is not something a male-dominated culture naturally gravitates towards, is it...
...We all feel the monotony, we all feel we cannot control our circumstances," said Mr...
...Ecological ruin, shrinking white-collar job market and fear of intimacy confronting his generation" is how that journal of deep thinking, People, describes the subject matter of Douglas Coupland, latest young writer to complain his way to literary prominence...
...Though, like many simple things (faith, grace, love, souffles), they are difficult to achieve...
...The job is a bore...
...That is, they don't have solutions outside ourselves...
...Let's give the professional worriers something to worry about...
...For all we know, Mrs...
...About 10 percent of America's population had been born in slavery...
...Especially, watching daytime TV...
...There was a page at the end where Barbie gave a lesson in sign language, showing us the signs for "push-up bra," "Let's go shopping," and "diamond tennis bracelet from middle-aged gentlemanadmirer...
...Instead we have to accept the undramatic and often extremely boring duties of working hard, exercising self-control, taking care of ourselves, our families, and our neighbors, being kind, and practicing as much private morality as we can stand without popping...
...We are responsible for massive pollution of earth, water and sky...
...Senate Studies...
...In a world with the cosmic staggers, where the Four Horsemen . . . are on an outright rampage" began a profile of harmless comedian Jerry Seinfeld in the May 1994 Vanity Fair...
...The Clinton State Department has created a position of Worry-Wart-inCharge, an "undersecretary of global affairs" who is to be responsible for "worldwide programs in human rights, the 38 The American Spectator October 1994 environment, population control and anti-narcotics efforts...
...Opportunity knocks, it jiggles the doorknob, it will try the window if we don't have the alarm system on...
...Schumer writes the "Underground Gourmet" column for New York magazine...
...Is it, as that Cassandra of food critics, Fran R. Schumer, would have it, "anomie" caused by "the decline of religion and community...
...And memo to Generation X: Pull your pants up, turn your hat around, and get a job...
...In fact, if we use the word politics in its broadest sense, The American Spectator October 1994 39 there really is only one political goal in the world...
...The licensed and certified holier-than-thou work toward a political goal...
...Things are better, in fact, than they were at 9:30 this morning, thanks to Tylenol and two Bloody Marys...
...Deputies and wildlife agents strung a net to catch the bear when the tranquilizers took effect...
...This state, those masses, that mankind, and the planet will then be run by...
...Even the bad things are better than they used to be...
...And such things as huge federal regulatory agencies and the Menendez jury aren't helping items one through three...
...M aybe we should also take dope...
...We should wipe the gnostic smirk of self-righteousness off the faces of the moral buttinskis...
...And what is it with this anomie stuff anyway...
...In general, life is better than it ever has been, and if you think that, in the past, there was some golden age of pleasure and plenty to which you would, if you were able, transport yourself, let me say one single word: "Dentistry...
...40 The American Spectator October 1994...
...Are we depressed by lower expectations...
...And because they worry so much, they must be experts, too...
...Our own nation is notably lacking on the fourth point...
...Maybe the best thing that could happen would be if it were to wipe out half or two-thirds of the people in the world...
...Because politicians worry so much about overpopulation, famine, ecological disaster, ethnic hatred, plague, and poverty, they must be superior people...
...Information is easily had...
...We have been miserably deficient in the instruction of the poor, perhaps the only means of really raising their condition...
...And here is my favorite tale of pained solicitude, from an AP wire story that appeared in the Arab News in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War, and which I have been saving ever since: Game wardens and wildlife biologists were among those gathered for nearly eight hours on a farm in northwestern Louisiana to save what they thought was a bear 50 to 60 feet up in a pine tree...
...We have been miserably deficient in the instruction of the poor, perhaps the only means of really raising their condition...
...The bullying of fellow citizens by means of dreads and frights has been going on since paleolithic times...
...And watch out, he may be trying to...
...Back in the sixties I expected Permanent Woodstock—a whole lifetime of sitting in the mud, smoking Oaxacan ditch weed, listening to amplifier feedback, and pawing a Long Island chiropodist's daughter who I hear America whining, crybaby to the world...
...People will call you a fool...
...My name is Legion...
Vol. 27 • October 1994 • No. 10
