A Paean to P.J.
On 15 February, 2022 the political satirist P. J. O’Rourke shuffled off the mortal coil and joined his fellow sarcastics Jonathan Swift, Mark Twain, P.G. Wodehouse, and H.L. Menken for drinks and cigars. RIP, good sir.
I don’t remember exactly when I first fell into P.J. O’Rourke’s work, but I’m pretty sure it’s when I was a student at U.C. Berkeley.
As a recovering Catholic school kid of the late 80’s, I was quickly becoming a requisite liberal at my new university. I entered as a full-time student just 2 years after my fellow classmates got the U.C. system to divest from South Africa. And my tenure was marked by a regular cadence of Dead shows at the Greek Theater and People’s Park protests that always invariably turned violent. Fights against “the establishment” I guess, because they own People’s Park—a cultural landmark that encouraged student dissent in the name of any just cause. I never took part in any of the student-led efforts, because I usually had to work.
I worked at Whelan’s Smoke Shop, an erstwhile general feed store from the 1800s when Berkeley was still a school for farm boys. But during my tenancy, it was the place to get international newspapers, magazines, candy, and, most essential for any aspiring intellectual, cigarettes.
Rolling Stone was one of the magazines on our shelves. It sat waist-high from the cash register on the other side of a bank of large cigar humidors; tilted shelves of open cigar boxes preening behind sliding glass doors. P.J. was the political and foreign affairs editor at Rolling Stone from the 80s until 2001, and his features were a must read for me.
He drew me in despite his conservatism for three reasons: (1) his affiliation with the gonzo journalism movement gave him bona fides that a student like me, reading “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” and “Autobiography of Brown Buffalo” could accept; (2) he was a very clear writer. I was studying a lot of German philosophy at the time and while that equipped me to be a master decipherer of the obtuse, reading P.J was like walking down a slight grade into a cool breeze after hiking up the Grand Canyon in late July; and finally (3) he was wickedly funny.
I fancied myself a student of comedy in those days, having grown up on the likes of Bill Cosby’s “Why is there Air?,” memorizing Robin Williams’ “Reality…What a Concept” (on 8-track!), and reveling in the genius of Eddie Murphy’s self-titled debut. P.J.’s comedy was not a performance narrative like the usual comedians, though it was observational in its way. It was comedy about a subject that is typically deadly serious and deadly boring: politics.
All comedy can be political, but P.J made politics comedy. He didn’t make politics less serious per se, but he did point out that politicians should rarely be taken seriously.
A product of the Midwest (he was from Toledo, Ohio) and the 60s anti-Vietnam War movement, he was a hedonist leftist who became a libertarian conservative, which over the years became more little ‘l’ libertarian than big ‘C’ conservative. Only his libertarianism could accommodate the hedonism, but as time went on, that folly grew restricted to a good drink, a fine cigar, and a piercing bon mot.
What makes P.J attractive to a certain type of politically and socially aware reader is that his ire and vitriol was directed at both sides, giving quarter to the cautious centrist intellectual. He made it okay to look disapprovingly at both sides of the aisle and, when deserving, give them the middle finger. That’s not to say he didn’t end up on one side more often than another. If he was wrong, it was usually about Democrats more than Republicans. In the early days of the Tea Party movement, he drank from that tannic brew steeped in every conservative’s pot, leading him to relegate Obama’s presidency to the dustbin of history in only the second year of its first term. Even so, he was willing to bring his disdain to our entire body politic.
"The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work, and then they get elected and prove it." – Parliament of Whores (1991)
But while his clever quips sometimes appeared to be a commentator’s version of “Get off my lawn”, he believed that people with different world views could gather and, so long as they agreed on the facts, reasonably debate reality and what to do about it.
He even endorsed Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. He said that his endorsement included her "lies and empty promises" and added "She's wrong about absolutely everything, but she's wrong within normal parameters."1
The problem as he saw it wasn’t just with politics but with the media. A this-or-that, tit-for-tat news cycle narrative that served only to proliferate mindless witless partisan conflict.
"The idea of a news broadcast once was to find someone with information and broadcast it. The idea now is to find someone with ignorance and spread it around." – Peace Kills (2004)
In his later years P.J. began to be seen as a moderate, and maybe even saw himself that way. His first appearance on NPR’s Wait, wait… don’t tell me!, was the week after 9/11, where he quickly became a favored guest. He also appeared 15 times on Real Time with Bill Maher. And the Guardian once labeled him the conservative lefties can love. And boy did we.
The view that there is a large middle that needs to be accommodated and empowered by politics and media was the subject of his last book, A Far Cry from the Middle (2020). It articulates the ethos we strive for at True Thirty: “It’s time for the rise of the extreme moderate. Power to the middle!”
“The extremely moderate’s non negotiable demand? Negotiation. We won’t compromise until we see some compromise.”
“And wouldn’t it be great if we had an opinion-free news media source? I have a perfect name for it, Happy Medium.”
“We may be on different sides of the fence, but let’s make that fence-top wider and better padded and go sit on it. Then, no matter if I’m of conservative ilk and your liberal stripe, we can have a neighborly chat.”2
In the end P.J. O’Rourke wasn’t trying to tell you why he was right; he was looking for a way forward that considered the possibility—the reality—that there are more than two sides to a thing, and if there’s only two sides, they’re probably both wrong.
Gass, Nick (May 9, 2016). "P.J. O'Rourke hate-endorses Hillary Clinton on NPR quiz show". Politico. Retrieved May 18, 2016.
A Cry from the Far Middle: Dispatches from a Divided Land (2020)
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A rich blend of more than two sides, like your cocktails on Instagram…compelling and yummy. Keep writing.