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The (Teen) Age of Satire
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19966 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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8 / 1992 |
2,558 Words |
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Lauren Weiner
Lauren Weiner covered Latin American affairs as a reporter for
the Washington Times for two years. Her articles and reviews
have appeared in the New Criterion, the National Interest,
Commentary, the Detroit News, and other publications. |
GIVE WAR A CHANCE
Eyewitness Accounts of Mankind's Struggle
Against Tyranny, Injustice and Alcohol-Free Beer
P.J. O'Rourke
New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1992
233 pp. $20.95
The P.J. O'Rourke phenomenon is a good thing . . . The P.J. O'Rourke phenomenon is a good thing . . . I just keep telling myself that.
Well, the P.J. O'Rourke phenomenon is a good thing, confound it. When spring rolled around and Stanford had to choose a graduation speaker upon whom to shower thousands of dollars, who got the nod? Mikhail Gorbachev. Then the other day Oxford University held what it called a "debate," sponsored by Vanity Fair magazine, between Democratic Party ideologue Sidney Blumenthal and the Nation's Christopher Hitchens. And recently students at the University of Michigan got to hear Alexander Cockburn, also of the Nation, offer up pearls of never-say-Red-is-dead wisdom.
The last time a celebrity Republican took the podium at a high-profile venue was when President Bush addressed graduating seniors at Notre Dame. In the somewhat broader category of non-presidents, however, you have to go to doughty little Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, to see an actual conservative shining in that spotlight of intellectual guruhood that only a campus lectureships committee can bestow.
P.J. O'Rourke spoke at Hillsdale in March. It is a good school, don't get me wrong. But until the Stalinists stop dwarfing their opponents in speaking fees, Oscar nominations, and other signs of cultural prestige, there will not be much justice in this post-Cold War world aside from the fact that we won. If history has thrown up Patrick Jake O'Rourke, forty-five, as the first loose pebble in a coming avalanche of shifting intellectual tastes, so be it.
Liberals scorn him as a Neanderthal but they buy his books on the sly; conservatives read him openly and think he is as good as Jonathan Swift. Neither group is correct. O'Rourke is a fundamentally decent Midwesterner who hypes his hippie past and supposedly boorish playboy present, and who writes political travelogues and essays in a New Journalistic style of satire that sometimes hits and sometimes
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