IN Republican Party Reptile, the book that extended his reputation beyond the United, States, P.J. O'Rourke recalled his grandmother's concern about his political views as a 19 year old and his boastful confession to being a Maoist. "Just so long as you're not a Democrat," the old lady conveniently replied.
She need not have worried. Her grandson, as his latest book shows, had too sharp an eye for the main chance to remain even mildly deviant for long.
O'Rourke nowadays comes before his public as a bird of rare plumage, a humorist espousing right wing views. His political, dedication may be less than profound, but he clearly revels in his reputation as a Republican clown in the coarse art of outrage. As well he might he has, after all, built himself a considerable career as the snot in the nose of liberal America.
Yet the first and most damning thing to be said about him is that he is neither as nasty nor as funny as his admirers would have us believe, and the first thing to be said about his latest book is that it is likely to disappoint even the most rabid of those admirers.
He calls the opening section "Juvenile Delinquent". It is, unfortunately, a title that would fit as snugly on the book itself. We are promised "a quarter century of previously uncollected fulminations, diatribes, philippics, animadversions, bullyrags, readings of the riot act, middle finger flag downs, scoffings, slander, calumnies and licks of the rough side of the tongue".
Never mind the thesaurus, what we have here is a flimsy ragbag of pieces going back to the author's claw sharpening days with the underground press. There are undergraduate jokes and squibs, including God bless the mark, concrete poetry and attempts at fiction.
There is his "automotive journalism", the product of assignments for the US glossy Car and Driver. The most recent pieces come from the American Spectator and Rolling Stone, a once radical rock magazine which currently retains O'Rourke as a sort of roving war jester.
This recycled material, most of which deserved the obscurity of the files from which it is culled is introduced with characteristic impudence "It is, I guess, interesting to watch the leftist weaving itself into the pupa of satire and then emerging a resplendent conservative blowfly".
The problem is that, even in the, publishers' less flashy claim that the collection traces his development from radical hippie to staunch conservative, "development" looks like an oversized word.
As late as 1993, in a piece for the American Spectator called "100 Reasons why Jimmy Carter was a Better President than Bill Clinton", O'Rourke came up with as risible a line as "Warren Christopher's initials look funnier on a briefcase than Cyrus Vance's did". That's by a man, who has been called America's greatest prose comedian.
"Your know where you stand with Republicans," he rounded off a piece celebrating their assumption of control of the US Congress. "Everybody realises we're SOBs ... And one more extremely important thing about Republicans. We're against gun control. You can shoot us." That's worse than silly. It's an extremely rash invitation from a man standing as close as he is here to a barrelful of fish.
If O'Rourke has a likable trait it has to be the candour, however calculated, with which he seeks to disarm his detractors. It is, I suppose, only natural that he would defend puerility he has fathered more of it than most.
He happily concedes, for instance, that the National Lampoon (of which he used to be editor and from which some of this material is drawn) could be puerile but excuses it on the grounds that it was well crafted, and by educated kids.
Today, his own stuff is even better crafted by an educated adult.
It is difficult to understand his continuing popularity in supposedly sophisticated places. Certainly he is a performer for whom the times have been propitious. He hit his stride just as his fellow Americans were embarking on a form of political correctness that threatened to reduce much of their mainstream journalism to a blandness beyond boredom.
One other thing that may have played a part in his ascension William F. Buckley was tripping offstage with his rapier as P.J. lumbered on with a claymore.
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