A Conversation with P.J. O'Rourke
P.J. O’Rourke, author of Parliament of Whores and Give War a Chance, talks about his new book, "A Cry from the Far Middle: Dispatches from a Divided Land".
On Tuesday, the great P.J. O’Rourke died. He was as close to being a rock star as a conservative writer can get. I was blessed to have gotten to meet him during the 2016 campaign when my friend, Will Rahn, introduced us (here’s a photo from that night). And in October of 2020, P.J. was kind enough to come on my podcast to talk about his then-new book, A Cry from the Far Middle: Dispatches from a Divided Land. During our conversation, we talked about humor, our country’s current division, and why kids are “lefty.”
I thought it might be appropriate to re-up some of that conversation for you in this email.
Here’s an excerpt that has been edited for clarity. Click here to listen to our full conversation.
Matt: You are a humorist, and nowadays people are so serious about politics. If you were starting out today, could you write the way that you write?
PJ: Oh, absolutely not. People forget what the point of humor is. I mean, humor doesn't come from cute cat videos. Your humor is not about what makes you giggle. Humor is about stuff that gets you confused… Humor is about stuff that makes us uncomfortable about the way we put a little distance between ourselves and what's going on. Try and get things in perspective a little bit, and really perspective has fallen out of fashion. I sort of feel like some old 19th century historical painter, painfully executing perfect perspective when Jackson Pollock is out there splashing house paint on the floor. And, yeah, it's a conundrum I think you feel.
Matt: One thing I loved about your book was your defense of BS, because I think BS gets a bad reputation. And you talked about having a BS degree or whatever.
PJ: And I don't mean a Bachelor of Science.
Matt: But like it is important. I have two little kids and like, I have to teach them how to BS to a certain degree if you're going to survive.
PJ: I have a boy in high school with an extremely “woke” English teacher, and they've got to give a presentation. And I said, “so what's your presentation going to be on?” And he said, “toxic masculinity.” I said, “I don't suppose you'll give equal time to toxic femininity,” which has been known to exist… And I said, “Why on God's green earth, did you pick that for your presentation?” And he just looked at me, you know, like, “woke school teacher. Woke the world. Dad? Are you crazy? Do you think I'm suicidal?”
Matt: I guess we are simultaneously living in the best and worst time ever, right?
PJ: Yeah, it's not good. But like compared against what was going on in the inner-cities in the 1960s? What was going on with big demonstrations in the 1960s? And then the heck with the 1960s, what about the 1860s? You know, “America has never been this divided.” I’m sorry, I'm not seeing Fort Sumter right now. Yeah. I mean, America has been a lot more divided than this. And America has been lots poorer than this. And America has been full of the kind of discrimination that would, you know, I suspect systemic would be hardly the word you would apply to the way that American Indians, black people, women, the poor, etc, were treated within living memory.
Matt: Your kids probably don't even remember the Soviet Union.
PJ: The fall of the Berlin Wall was as long ago for them, as the Great Depression is for me. And actually, if you want to go back to when the Cold War was hot, we're talking about going back in time for me to like the Coolidge Administration or something. Of course, they don't get it. They don't know. They think communism is, I don't know, cheap rum and cute girls and old American cars and Guantanamo era sing alongs in Cuba.
Matt: Don't you think it's different though, in this sense, I could show you a video of the Reagan years that would look dated, but fairly modern. Whereas if you were living in the 1970s, and you tried to watch something from the 1940s, it would seem ancient.
PJ: My wife, Tina, and I were just indulging ourselves the other night and sort of like 80s music-athon. You know, watching, The Talking Heads and Blondie. A lot of that stuff stands up really well. You know, a lot of it could still be a viable act, you know, not so true of Perry Como. From the end of World War I until the end of the 1960s, social change was happening so fast that it just burned people's eyeballs. They just couldn't take it in. And that’s really no longer is the case. It's almost like people have to go out and I don't know, invent something to be disturbed about.
Matt: You write that kids are born communists, and that makes sense, right? I mean, we give them everything.
PJ: There's an old Churchill saw about “a young man who's not a leftist has no heart and the old man who's not a conservative has no brain” or something to that effect… When kids are kids, it is from each according to his ability to each according to his need. And then when kids get out in the cold, windy, rainy world…it's it's a bit bit like finding out about Santa Claus. I always think that the whole Santa Claus thing is something that we do to kids to give them experience of myth busting…so that all the other broken hearts that they'll experience in their life will be easier for them to take.