Rational Lampoon

...So what's the problem with this book...

...But when Russell Baker described a very similar childhood predicament in Growing Up, it was impossible to doubt that it affected Baker just the way he said it did...

...Apart from all this, O'Rourke manages to explain the S&L fiasco with clarity, describes what it is like to go with the police on a drug raid, makes the right points about why farm programs and Social Security waste so much money, and inveighs against the American Association of Retired Persons for its greedy opposition to Medicare reform...

...Its strengths reflect well on the author himself...

...O'Rourke can be jolted out of the stereotypes by reporting, which is something...

...That is, they were forceful and tireless but not exactly blessed with the light touch...

...James Fallows is the Washington editor of The Atlantic and a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...

...But things have certainly changed in the journalistic and political worlds...

...In the many parts of this book that are good, O'Rourke has shown that he doesn't need to rely on these devices anymore...

...When you read editorials in The Wall Street Journal, you sense, as with the Vatican Curia, that no conceivable event in the factual world could shake the cardinals' faith in their doctrine...

...Hollywood still seems to operate on the liberalism-equals-sex-appeal principle...

...The most annoying trait of Right-Wing Outlaws in general is a lazy incuriosity about the real world...

...Yes, everybody acts this way sometimes...

...I just thought we were broke...

...Then my mother got cancer...

...He loves it when the Republicans win but loves to make fun of them...

...The American Spectator made fun of, rather than moralized about, Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale...

...Everyone was expected simply to shut up and behave...

...He has focused on the main problem: the tyranny of the politician's schedule that barely leaves anyone time for two consecutive thoughts...

...His natural instinct is to portray everyone except right-wing wiseguys as being ludicrous members of the Rainbow Coalition...

...It's visceral, hormonal...

...The notion behind Parliament of Whores, apart from the idea that O'Rourke might combine some of his old magazine pieces with new reporting, is that the book will give a tour of the government and public policy that is conservative and funny at the same time...

...in reality, "listening post" means "place where at least one hotel has a bar, a swimming pool, and a staff that speaks English...

...Who, Me?' What Happens to a Senator's Day," published in these pages 22 years ago...

...During the generation or two before that, to be a cultural outlaw was to be a left-winger...

...But it is, well, shameful for O'Rourke to wisecrack his way around this subject, especially in a book saying that Americans don't take actions and their consequences seriously enough, that we live in a "well-padded little universe, a world with no sharp edges or hard surfaces...

...Floored O'Rourke's most intriguing excursion into political realities, and the one that shows most clearly how his experience as a reporter can shape his views, concerns Congress...

...They know their lines, they're sure who the good guys and bad guys are...

...It seems like a convenient, Reaganesque rendering of family history, drawn to neatly fit the current right-wing line...

...cram-session briefings on a dozen issues the congressman has never heard of before but on which he must cast a vote...

...He uses drugs but is against welfare...

...P. J. O'Rourke, on the other hand, has spent a lot of time watching, listening, and apparently developing his views on the basis of what he sees and hears...

...He takes the post-Charles Murray view that it's all been a mistake and that welfare, by trying too hard to "help" people, actually gives them incentives to fail...

...O'Rourke breaks from the right-wing bad boys This is a much better book* than I would ever have expected...

...The strange thing is, as Lloyd Grove pointed out in The Washington Post, it was written by a man who, when he had a chance to put "weapon to hand" in Vietnam, avoided service by producing a doctor's letter saying that he used marijuana, mescaline, and LSD too often to be draftable...

...His distinctive contribution to the welfare debate is to claim that he's been there himself and knows how corrupting charity can be: My own family was poor when I was a kid, though I didn't know it...

...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...

...It entails—as all ceremonial roles do ceaseless repetition, stultifying dullness, and swollen self-regard...

...It is that excitement in the gut, the swelling of the chest, the involuntary smile that comes across the face of every male when he has a weapon to hand...

...Perhaps O'Rourke is being completely sincere, and I'm the one who's being too cynical...

...The Atlantic Monthly Press, $19.95...

...Lee Atwater playing blues guitar represented Right-Wing Outlaw style at its peak...

...A larger problem involves the two great pillars of right-wing orthodoxy: welfare, which is to say race, and defense...

...Nonetheless, O'Rourke's view is an improvement over the usual right-wing moaning about pinko reporters...

...What we managed to escape in 1966 in Squaresville, Ohio, was not poverty...

...Numerous demonstrations, marches, PR stunts, and other staged events are held in Washington to give journalists an excuse for not covering real events, which are much harder to explain," he says...

...Perhaps I'm overreacting, as with Samuel Johnson and the talking dog...

...Still, the half or so of this book that is very strong shows that O'Rourke's main literary virtue is like Tom Wolfe's...

...Yes, there is a pencil-neck, elitist side to the movement, but O'Rourke is pandering to Right-Wing Outlaw doctrine in sneering at the entire concept...

...This is not the first time such ideas have appeared in print—it's more like the 1,000th time, if you count the previous 999 mentions in this very magazine...

...A minor illustration is his relentless mockery of environmentalism...

...But O'Rourke has traveled enough in the Third World to know that the average Juan and the average Mobutu are the ones whose lives are really being ruined by environmental problems...

...We had that...

...In one family, the father got sick or was laid off...

...But he falls back into them when there's nothing else to go on...

...The genre in question, that of the Right-Wing Outlaw, didn't even exist 15 years ago...

...I was part of it while you were summering in Maine...

...Ronald Reagan, who had a truly hard-luck childhood, seemed to be more affected by his own fantasized versions of his past...

...College newspapers like the Dartmouth Review and overaged collegians like the editorial writers of The Wall Street Journal specialized in being wiseguys...

...I wouldn't care to be the skinny health-food nut waving a copy of Fifty Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth who tries to stand in Juan's way...

...He says: The average Juan and the average Mobutu out there in the parts of the world where every day is Earth Day, or Dirt and Squalor Day, anyhow, would like to have a color television, too...

...It is possible to have such an experience and not reflect on it...

...O'Rourke writes: 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...

...What we managed to escape was help...

...rushed meetings with constituents...

...This sounds very hard-headed and Wolfe-like, piercing the delusions of the high-minded elite...

...That virtue is not showy writing nor glee in ridiculing leftist poseurs but a willingness to go out and look at things rather than sit home and work out bons mots...

...The significant point is that he seems to take this theory, donning it like a stylish suit, rather than developing it or testing it as he does some other concepts...

...He accompanied one, whom he does not name, through a typical midweek schedule: two breakfast meetings...

...This is a nice, roguish-sounding line...

...The average Juan does want a television and a car and namebrand tennis shoes...

...The people who have the greatest reason to worry about air pollution are not the residents of Los Angeles but those of Mexico City and Bangkok...

...He takes just the opposite approach...

...Right-wing activists tended to resemble Ayn Rand or Pat Buchanan or Jeane Kirkpatrick or Jack Kemp...

...Warren Beatty, Madonna, Spike Lee, and Jack Nicholson are all flashy...

...He responds to and conveys the basic likability of the typical politician, however unlikable they may be as a class...

...At the same time, it's an attempt (like Peggy Noonan's in her autobiography) to maumau his fellow Republicans and many Democrats: Look, don't tell me about the culture of poverty...

...The only budget he really likes is for the Pentagon, and he makes a little joke about it this way: The best and final argument against cutting defense spending cannot be put into words...

...What's more surprising is that so much of it is smart...

...Mild at heart There is something more than fishy in his view of defense...

...Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsburg and Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson and Michael Herr, John Lennon and Mick Jagger and the music world in general, they all implied that to be sexy and clever you also had to be on the left...

...Maybe I'm being unfair, but O'Rourke's recounting of this experience, which is out of character with almost everything else in the book, sounds fishy to me...

...The official conservative line about Congress, of course, is that it's a craven and unprincipled body, afraid to do anything except spend other people's money...

...Buffalo soldier P. J. O'Rourke, who started out being a generalpurpose outlaw as editor of the National Lampoon, has positioned himself as a right-winger for the past few years...

...The book is, indeed, very funny...

...It is easy to imagine O'Rourke writing just such a screed, especially since he includes a few of them in this book...

...Charlton Heston, he of the NRA ads, is not...

...Wisecracks and conventional wisdom are ways of avoiding the hard surfaces...

...O'Rourke hasn't been as thorough in reporting every subject as he has with Social Security or the daily grind of a congressman's life...

...Even those who have not seen it first hand may recognize it from James Boyd's famous " 'Legislate...

...I ended up with the wholly unanticipated feeling that, if O'Rourke went out and seriously boned up on a subject, he'd react with insight and, relatively speaking, good sense...

...He is far from the only one, especially among the right-wing "chickenhawks," who finds the juxtaposition of these facts inconvenient now...

...P. J. O'Rourke...

...If O'Rourke really wanted to be an outlaw, he'd make fun of the unending victory parades and We're-Number-One celebrations that followed the Gulf war...

...After an experience like that, it was hard for Baker to view the world with a steely, moralistic sense that people high and low fully "deserved" their stations in life...

...The most immediate effect of tropical deforestation, for example, is on the people in Borneo and Thailand who lose their homes and jobs and children when floods roar off denuded hills...

...He says in this book that at the 1989 inaugural ball, Marilyn Quayle's chignon hairdo made her "look considerably less like a Cape buffalo than usual...

...Its weaknesses are mainly those of a genre O'Rourke has let himself fall into, one he should begin crawling out of as soon as he can...

...a baffling session on the floor...

...But if P. J. O'Rourke, who unlike Reagan responds very acutely to experience, grew up poor, as he says, it is strange that it had no apparent effect other than to make him embrace rightwing orthodoxy about welfare programs...

...In the same press-critic vein, O'Rourke says that "Peshawar was the principal Afghan war 'listening post,' which is journalese for 'place that's close, but not too close, to the action and has bottled water.' " This is imprecise...

...The result is as fair and illuminating as if, say, Alexander Cockburn purported to describe modern Republicanism by profiling David Duke supporters in some Louisiana bayou...

...Being in the White House press corps is essentially ceremonial...

...My father died, and my mother married a drunken bum who shortly thereafter died himself...

...Because this is, in the end, what legislators do...

...Tom Wolfe came out of the closet as a rightwinger in the early eighties to become the first flashy conservative...

...But environmental protection affects him in something more than the tooty-frooty way O'Rourke suggests...

...The Young Republicans of those days were the overearnest strivers who wore neckties to college classes and later got hauled up before the Watergate committees...

...It is so amazing to find that O'Rourke is serious and sophisticated about any governmental issue that it's tempting to forget the countless other issues about which he makes cheap-shot jokes...

...Government...

...On the basis of this book, it did not shake his complacency about the deserving rich and undeserving poor...

...One of the most successful (and funniest) current conservative outlaws, the radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh, is happy to admit that his "research" consists of taking items off the newswire to fit his pat theories about animal rights, the Kennedy family, and so on...

...You wouldn't want to just wound her...

...This is part of the human comedy of politics, as anyone who has seen it knows...

...Without announcing it directly, Baker showed that his family's misfortune in the Depression permanently altered his view of the chanciness of life...

...But I honestly didn't know we were poor until just now, when I was researching poverty levels...

...P. J. O'Rourke is not the only male who is intrigued by weapons, or the only one who didn't want to go to Vietnam, or the only one for whom both statements are true...

...But it is nice to see the lights going on in other parts of the political world...

...But the very success of conservatism has made it quite complacent...

...a hearing at 9:30 and another at 10...

...I have an idea that—like the Cape buffalo—if Marilyn gets furious and charges, you've got only one shot at the skull...

...O'Rourke does not spend a lot of time on welfare, but what he does say is predictable and unconvincing...

...The "skinny health-food nut" line represents the way O'Rourke approaches almost any issue that he hasn't gone out of his way to study...

...No one coddled or "understood" this distressed family...

...Therefore they view the passing world as a kind of animated Bartlett's Quotations— that is, as handy source material with which to illustrate, rather than challenge, preconceived views...

...Even in the inexact form, the concept will be familiar to Washington Monthly readers...

...But he also decided to see how a congressman actually spends his day...

...Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S...

...O'Rourke goes on to say that he was saved by the stuffiness and intolerance of neighborhood values in the bad old unprogressive days...

...Not an enviable task...

...When he lacks reporting, he 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...

...In another, the father kept his health and, even more luckily in those years, kept his job...

...So should it be today...

...The book is full of anthropological observations about the realities of daily life that make bureaucrats and reporters behave the way they do...

...They listen to us...

...He saw some families survive and some sink for reasons that were more or less accidental...

...O'Rourke's description of Congress is impressive in several ways...

...While the official right-wing line, partly true, is that Congress sucks endless amounts of money into its own preservation and expansion, O'Rourke offers this semi-idealistic view: We Americans have struck a remarkable bargain...