GIVE WAR A CHANCE by P.J. O'Rourke

A posthumous re-read

The political satirist P.J. O’Rourke died a month ago, which led to a somewhat surprising flood of tributes. I say “somewhat surprising” mostly because while I really enjoyed his stuff back in the day, he had pretty comprehensively dropped off the radar for me a good while back. The last book of his that I actually own is Eat the Rich from 1999, though I think I may have read one of the next ones out of the library back in 2002 or so. He was apaprently still writing books that sold a shitload of copies right on up to 2020, but I just wasn’t aware of them.

It was also surprising because he was both famously a political conservative, and infamously acerbic, either of which is an awkward fit with most modern media. And the combination seems an exceedingly odd thing to be praising in 2022.

Anyway, after listening to the tribute segment on The Press Box podcast, I dug through the crap on our bookshelves to uncover the O’Rourke section, and take a look back at some of his stuff. More or less at random I landed on Give War a Chance from 1992, a collection of columns he wrote mostly for Rolling Stone during my college years. These cover the end of the Cold War and the first Gulf War, and I remember enjoying it quite a bit back then.

On re-reading it thirty-ish years later, there are a lot of bits that stuck in my mind for all this time. Such as his description of his family history in Ireland:

It seems we were king in the olden days. But who wasn’t? It must have been interesting, the Ireland of Zero AD: “I’m the king— from this rock down to the creek and from that cow to the tree. And this is my wife, the Queen, and our dog, Prince. And it must have been every bit as peaceful as it is today, with a million or two kings on one island.

Or this bit from a column about Paraguay (“the difference between a B and a B- on a geography exam):

Paraguayan church architecture is non-nonsense stuff. The churches look like horse barns with verandas. But inside, they’re really retina-thrashers. The eighteenth-century church in the tow of Yaguaron contains two thousand square feet of crazed whittling, a masterpiece of Paraguayan baroque. It’s as ridiculously detailed as anything from the Europe of that era but with fun Guarani Indian touches such as drug-trip color combinations and altar chairs with armrests that turn into snakes. I took a close look at some of the carved portraits of snakes, and I think the Guaranis were pulling the padres’ legs vis-a-vis conversion to Christianity.

Or this concise description of the origin of the modern Middle East:

Until 1918 the Arabian peninsula was ruled by the Ottoman Empire, so called because it had the same amount of intelligence and energy as a footstool. When the Turks backs the wrong horse in World War I, the French and English divvied up the region in a manner both completely self-serving and unbelievably haphazard, like monkeys at a salad bar.

Or, finally, this explanation of the media’s role in the first Gulf War:

You may wonder what the job os being a Gulf War journalist is like. Well, we spend all day broadcasting on the radio and TV telling people back home what’s happening over here. And we learn what’s happening over here by spending all day monitoring the radio and TV broadcasts from back home. You may also wonder how any actual information ever gets into this loop. If you find out, please call.

The man definitely had a way with words. And on re-reading this, I can definitely see an influence on my own writing style.

Being a collection, this is a bit of mixed bag, both in terms of content and how well it’s aged. The straight-up travelogue pieces mostly hold up as snapshots of a particular time and place, though some of them, like the piece where he visits Kiev and Tiblisi in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the USSR have taken on a very different resonance due to more recent events. Some of the other pieces fare much less well— reviews of long-forgotten books, some ranting about dimly-remembered celebrities.

In terms of style and content, a lot of this is really odd to read in 2022. In part because many of the political figures he’s lambasting seem so quaint compared to the crew that we have infesting Washington these days. But mostly because he goes after a lot of them in ways that probably wouldn’t fly today— too direct and personal for the “woke” crowd, too highbrow for the MAGA set. In a weird way, this makes me want to read one of his Trump-era books, just to see how he navigated the modern political and publishing landscape.

Anyway, it was interesting to revisit this era, in much the same way that it’s fun to re-watch movies from the 80’s with my kids. I’m not sure I can exactly recommend this particular book to anyone who hasn’t read it before, though.

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This is getting sent out late on Mondaymostly because I spent the day driving an hour north to get in one last good day of cross-country skiing before all the snow melts. This is normally kind of dead time for me, so I may start trying to use it for posting lighter stuff; or maybe not. Anyway, here are the usual buttons:

And the comments will be open if you want them.