Thrown Under the Omnibus Read online

  ALSO BY P. J. O’ROURKE

  Modern Manners

  An Etiquette Book for Rude People

  The Bachelor Home Companion

  A Practical Guide to Keeping House Like a Pig

  Republican Party Reptile

  Confessions, Adventures, Essays, and (Other) Outrages

  Holidays in Hell

  In Which Our Intrepid Reporter Travels to the World’s Worst Places and Asks, “What’s Funny About This?”

  Parliament of Whores

  A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government

  Give War a Chance

  Eyewitness Accounts of Mankind’s Struggle Against Tyranny, Injustice, and Alcohol-Free Beer

  All the Trouble in the World

  The Lighter Side of Overpopulation, Famine, Ecological Disaster, Ethnic Hatred, Plague, and Poverty

  Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut

  “I Was Tragically Hip and I Recovered! You Can Too!”

  Eat the Rich

  A Treatise on Economics

  The CEO of the Sofa

  One Year in the Life of a Man Who Said, “Mind If I Put My Feet Up? I Think I Will Take This Lying Down.”

  Peace Kills

  America’s Fun New Imperialism

  On The Wealth of Nations

  A Minor Mister Opines upon a Master’s Magnum Opus

  Driving Like Crazy

  Thirty Years of Vehicular Hell-Bending Celebrating America the Way It’s Supposed to Be—with an Oil Well in Every Backyard, a Cadillac Escalade in Every Carport, and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Mowing Our Lawn

  Don’t Vote—It Just Encourages the Bastards

  A Treatise on Politics

  Holidays in Heck

  A Former War Correspondent Experiences Frightening Vacation Fun

  The Baby Boom

  How It Got That Way … And It Wasn’t My Fault … And I’ll Never Do It Again

  THROWN

  UNDER THE

  OMNIBUS

  A Reader

  P. J. O’Rourke

  Copyright © 2015 by P. J. O’Rourke

  Jacket illustration by Patrick Oliphant

  Jacket design by Marc Cohen/mjcdesign

  Author photograph by James Kegley

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011

  or [email protected].

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  FIRST EDITION

  ISBN 978-0-8021-2366-4

  eISBN 978-0-8021-9140-3

  Atlantic Monthly Press

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  groveatlantic.com

  15 16 17 18 19 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To Tina

  For the daughters, the son, the moon, and the stars

  And malt does more than Milton can

  To justify God’s way to man.

  —A. E. Housman

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  ALSO BY P. J. O’ROURKE

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Selections From …

  Modern Manners (1983, revised edition 1989)

  What Are Manners?

  The Fundamentals of Contemporary Courtesy

  Important People

  The Bachelor Home Companion (1987, revised edition 1993)

  We Are All Bachelors Now

  How I Became a Bachelor Housewife

  Bachelor Entertaining

  Republican Party Reptile (1987)

  Myths Made Modern

  Ship of Fools

  How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink

  A Cool and Logical Analysis of the Bicycle Menace

  The King of Sandusky, Ohio

  Holidays in Hell (1988)

  A Ramble through Lebanon

  Among the Euro-Weenies

  At Sea with the America’s Cup

  Seoul Brothers

  The Holyland—God’s Monkey House

  Third World Driving Hints and Tips

  Parliament of Whores (1991)

  Preface

  The Mystery of Government

  The Winners Go to Washington, D.C.

  Agricultural Policy

  At Home in the Parliament of Whores

  Give War a Chance (1992)

  The Death of Communism

  Return of the Death of Communism

  Dispatches from the Gulf War

  All the Trouble in the World (1994)

  Multiculturalism

  Famine

  Environment

  Plague

  Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut (1995)

  A Few Thoughts on Humor and Humorists

  The Welsh National Combined Mud Wrestling and Spelling Bee Championship

  Fly-Fishing

  Bird Hunting

  Deep-Sea Fishing

  Golf

  Eat the Rich (1998)

  Love, Death, and Money

  Bad Capitalism

  Bad Socialism

  From Beatnik to Business Major

  How to Make Nothing from Everything

  How to Make Everything from Nothing

  Eat the Rich

  The CEO of the Sofa (2001)

  “It’s a Person!”

  Kid Pro Quo

  What You Learn from Having Kids

  Summer

  35th Anniversary of Elaine’s Restaurant

  Venice vs. Vegas

  Blind (Drunk) Wine Tasting

  The Memoir

  Excuses for Republicans

  Unpublished Introduction to the 25th Anniversary Edition of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

  Peace Kills (2004)

  Why Americans Hate Foreign Policy

  Kosovo

  Israel

  9/11 Diary

  Kuwait and Iraq

  On The Wealth of Nations (2007)

  An Inquiry into An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

  The Wealth of Nations, Book 1

  The Wealth of Nations, Book 2

  Driving Like Crazy (2009)

  Sgt. Dynaflo’s Last Patrol

  A Better Land than This

  Reincarnation

  Big Love

  Don’t Vote—It Just Encourages the Bastards (2010)

  Politics Makes Us Free—And We’re Worth It

  A Digression on Happiness

  The Purgatory of Freedom and the Hell of Politics

  Taxes

  More Taxes

  Why I’m Right

  Holidays in Heck (2011)

  Introduction

  Republicans Evolving

  A Horse of a Different Color

  A Journey to … Let’s Not Go There

  The
Seventy-Two-Hour Afghan Expert

  The Baby Boom (2014)

  Prologue

  In the Doldrums of Fun

  The Prelude

  Ripeness Is All

  Big Damn Messy Bundle of Joy

  Acknowledgments

  Back Cover

  INTRODUCTION

  There’s a long-term problem with being a writer, and the problem is all the things that, over the long term, I’ve written. How would you like to have the twaddle and blather you talked forty years ago preserved in detail, set down in black and white, and still extant someplace?

  I once had hope that the fashion for recycling would rid me of my printed past. But what artisan—however modest his art—can bear to think that his life’s work amounts to no more than the one-one hundredth part of the local Boy Scout paper drive? So there’s still a heap of it in an attic closet.

  Then came digitization, when everything one has ever written or said or, for all I know, thought is embalmed and heaped in the infinite attic closet of the Internet.

  Sooner or later somebody will discover those closets and these skeletons. I might as well publish them myself. Also, I’m being paid for it. The business of trading embarrassment for something of value is an ancient custom, dating back to the murky beginnings of The Oprah Winfrey Show.

  Examining my musty work I see evidence that I was once younger than anyone ever has been. And on drugs. At least I hope I was on drugs. I’d hate to think that these were my sober and well-considered thoughts. It is, I guess, interesting to watch the leftist grub weaving itself into the pupa of satire and then emerging a resplendent conservative blowfly. Also interesting is the career arc. I start out making cruel fun of a second-rate American president and wind up making cruel fun of a second-rate American president.

  And that is all the interest I can summon. I wonder how many people in the so-called creative fields stand before their accumulated professional efforts and think that the thing they’ve been doing for the past four decades is a thing for which they have no particular talent. Not enough, to judge by the too copious output of various mature painters, poets, and architects. Hardly ever do we hear these people exclaim, “My pictures don’t look like anything,” “My poems don’t rhyme,” or “This isn’t a building, it’s the box a building comes in.”

  Fortunately, I discovered journalism. Talent hasn’t been a question since. But I didn’t mean to be a journalist. I meant to be a genius. I was going to produce an oeuvre so brilliant, important, and deep that no one would ever understand it. Pooh on Finnegans Wake. “… riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs …” Anybody can read that. Here’s a line from a play I wrote in 1968: “vIvAvIvAvIvA vIvAvIvAvIvA vIvAvIvAvIvA.”

  Unfortunately I didn’t have the knack for literature. It seemed that a certain number of English professors had to have written brilliant, important, and deep PhD dissertations on how no one would ever understand you. Also, it helped to be dead.

  To tell the truth, I didn’t even mean to be a writer. I meant to be a race-car driver, except I didn’t have a race car. Or I meant to be a rock star, except I couldn’t sing or play an instrument. (I know, I know, there are so many who never let that stop them, but I was naive.) Or I meant to be a soldier of fortune except the entry-level job in that field was a stint in Vietnam and, jeez, they were actually shooting at you over there. What I meant not to be was just a college student. How bourgeois. I did spend the summer of 1966 working as a railroad brakeman, and that seemed to me to be the coolest job that a fellow who knew all the verses to “If I Had a Hammer” could possibly have. I wanted to quit college and stay a brakeman forever, but (this never seemed to happen to Neal Cassady) my mother wouldn’t let me.

  So I had to find something I could be while also being a college student and something that didn’t require expensive equipment, difficult skills, or courage under fire. Writing was the obvious choice.

  I decided that I would, over the summer of 1967, write a novel. I wasn’t sure how long something had to be before it was considered a novel so I looked around for the briefest acceptable example of the type. I settled on Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. In point of learning the craft, I would have been better off reading the book. Instead, I counted the words in it, multiplying the average per page by the total of pages to arrive at the figure 50,000. There were 130 days in my summer vacation. If I wrote 384 words a day I would be within 80 words of a complete novel by fall. And, so, every night after work and every noontime when I got up on Saturdays and Sundays, I would sit down and write 384 words. Oh, sometimes it was 380 and sometimes 390, but usually I was pretty close to my mark. And in September I indeed had something that was … just awful.

  I have not been able to reread it, partly because of severe wincing but partly because I couldn’t type and all 49,920 words are scrawled in longhand (also execrably spelled and punctuated with mad abandon). The text concerns, as much as I can determine or remember, being young in Ohio. Fair enough, since I’d never been anything other than young in Ohio (though I had visited Chicago and been to Florida twice). I believe the protagonist visits Chicago and goes to Florida twice. The problem with the book is that I saw being young in Ohio as a horror beyond telling and my prose proved the case.

  When I got back to school in the fall, I gave my opus to Jerry Bovim, the only real writer I knew. Jerry hadn’t actually published anything, but I could tell Jerry was a real writer because, although he was not yet thirty, he was already drinking himself to death. (I still have some of Jerry’s fragmentary manuscripts, and the sad truth is that he was a real writer. Indeed, he might have been another John Kennedy Toole if only he’d killed himself after he’d completed something instead of before.) Jerry wrote a long critique, a largely charitable assessment in which he expounded upon the difficulties of the picaresque novel, the challenges of first-person narration, and the need for consistency in fictional point of view. He allowed that some of my characters were effective, was indulgent with my attempts at plot development, and even went so far as to say “the thing as a whole is rather likable.” But at the end of his commentary he appended this postscript: “It has just occurred to me that there is, however, the dreadful possibility that your book is supposed to be serious.”

  MODERN MANNERS

  (1983, revised edition 1989)

  “A gentleman is one who never inflicts pain.”

  —Cardinal Newman

  “Unintentionally.”

  —Oscar Wilde

  What Are Manners?

  Manners are a way to express altruism in daily life. Either that or manners are a way to screw people over without their knowing it. Anyway, manners are what your mother always wanted you to have. Whether your mother is a noble idealist or a scheming bitch is something that must be decided by you.

  How Can Good Manners Be Identified?

  Good manners are a combination of intelligence, education, taste, and style mixed together so that you don’t need any of those things. Good manners have a number of distinctive qualities. First, they can be learned by rote. This is a good thing; otherwise most rich men’s daughters could not be displayed in public. Secondly, manners do not vary from culture to culture or place to place. The same polite behavior that makes you a welcome guest in the drawing rooms of Kensington is equally appropriate among the Mud People of the fierce Orokaiva tribe of Papua New Guinea—if you have a gun. This is the advantage of Western-style manners. Citizens of Westernized countries still have most of the guns.

  Another distinctive quality of manners is that they have nothing to do with what you do, only how you do it. For example, Karl Marx was always polite in the British Museum. He was courteous to the staff, never read with his hat on, and didn’t make lip farts when he came across passages in Hegel with which he disagreed. Despite the fact that his political exhortations have caused the deaths of millions, he is today mor
e revered than not. On the other hand, John W. Hinckley Jr. was only rude once, to a retired Hollywood movie actor, and Hinckley will be in a mental institution for the rest of his life.

  How Do Good Manners Work?

  Manners exist because they are useful. In fact, good manners are so useful that with them you can replace most of the things lacking in modern life.

  Good manners can replace religious beliefs. In the Episcopal Church they already have. Etiquette (and quiet, well-cut clothing) is devoutly worshipped by Episcopalians.

  Good manners can replace morals. It may be years before anyone knows if what you are doing is right. But if what you are doing is nice, it will be immediately evident. Senator Edward Kennedy, for instance, may or may not be a moral person, but he is certainly a polite one. When Miss Kopechne seemed to be in trouble, Senator Kennedy swam all the way to Edgartown rather than run up a stranger’s phone bill calling for help. You should be the same way yourself. If you happen to be on a sinking ship with too few lifeboats, take one and slip quietly away. There’s going to be a terrific fuss among the drowning passengers, and it’s rude to deliberately overhear an argument which is none of your concern.

  Good manners can also replace love. Most people would rather be treated courteously than loved, if they really thought about it. Consider how few knifings and shootings are the result of etiquette as compared to passion.

  And good manners can replace intellect by providing a set of memorized responses to almost every situation in life. Memorized responses eliminate the need for thought. Thought is not a very worthwhile pastime anyway. Thinking allows the brain, an inert and mushy organ, to exert unfair domination over more sturdy and active body parts such as the muscles, the digestive system, and other parts of the body you can have a lot of thoughtless fun with. Thinking also leads to theories, and theoretical correctness is always the antithesis of social correctness. How much better history would have turned out if the Nazis had been socially correct instead of true to their hideous theories. They never would have shipped all those people to concentration camps in boxcars. They would have sent limousines to pick them up.

  Thinking is actually rude in and of itself. Manners involve interaction with others. You cannot, for instance, think and listen to what other people are saying at the same time. And what most people have to say doesn’t merit much thought; so if you are caught thinking, you really have no excuse.