Review Reviews: Parliament of Whores (In Honor of the Late P.J. O’Rourke)

“OUR GOVERNMENT: WHAT THE F-CK DO THEY DO ALL DAY, AND WHY DOES IT COST SO G-DD-MNED MUCH MONEY?” (capitalization, bolded font, and vulgarity not being attributable to any artistic license of mine) is the title of the antepenultimate section of Parliament of Whores by P.J. O’Rourke. As one of the resident libertarian members of The Review, the reader needn’t be psychic to predict my appreciation for a novel with such an offensive title and bellicose section heading.

The late and legendary P.J. O’Rourke was a “conservative” …  or so he referred to himself. I like to conceive of him as more of a grumpy libertarian disillusioned about human nature. In Parliament of Whores, he displays not only his internecine knowledge of our government’s innerworkings and encyclopedic knowledge of the English language (while I like to think I have above-average facility with the English language, I found myself pestering Google for definitions every five minutes or so), nor just his incomparable wit, humor, and Gonzo-journalist badassery, but also, occasionally, some charity and introspection.

To include all of O’Rourke’s choice quotes, refrains, and excoriations would be to copy and paste a digital version of the novel here. Although he is dead, I imagine Grove Press, the publisher and copyright holder (is that how IP law works?) of the text, would be quite displeased with a verbatim reprinting. Not only would the coffers of The Review be severely depreciated by the ensuing litigation, frivolous though it may be, but I imagine that neither our printers and readership nor Dartmouth’s janitors would be too pleased either.

All these concerns kept in mind, I shall endeavor to do O’Rourke’s already eminently readable and short novel justice by further truncating it: a fool’s errand but, far from matching the intellect of O’Rourke, an errand fit for myself.

The subtitle being “a lone humorist attempts to explain the entire U.S. government,” O’Rourke begins by presenting “THE MYSTERY OF GOVERNMENT.” O’Rourke broadly enumerates the sundry ways in which “an allegedly free people [have spawned] a vast, rampant cuttlefish of dominion.” Such colorful language is so common throughout the piece, as the reader will see, that one almost forgets that the text is monochromatic.

In “THE DICTATORSHIP OF BOREDOM,” O’Rourke bemoans the undisguised tribalism and demagoguery engendered and promoted by team Blue and Red: “both Democrats and Republicans are guilty of mindless sports-fan behavior, rat-gagging gluttony for political office and ideology without ideas.” If this is how he described partisanship in 2003, one shudders to think what words–in all likelihood, not fit for print–he would be using today. Always one to flip conventional wisdom on its head, he makes the counterintuitive observation that, despite popular belief, “enormous effort and elaborate planning are required [for the state] to waste [so] much money.”

The first two sections were merely O’Rourke stretching; here comes the action: “THE THREE BRANCHES OF GOVERNMENT: MONEY, TELEVISION AND BULLSHIT.” After detailing the tedious, thankless, and Herculean task of federal lawmaking, O’Rourke questions Americans’ mystical treatment of the president as “a divine priest-king,” despite him seeming “slightly unemployed” upon closer inspection. That is, P.J. O’Rourke’s closer inspection of the Commander-in-Chief’s largely perfunctory social duties and certainly not any inspection conducted by the innumerable Yes-men would (deceitfully) describe him as executing.

Lest one think O’Rourke has more respect for the Courts, he mercilessly excoriates the Supreme Court as “a secret and autocratic institution” which “for all we know… decides cases by playing nude games of Johnny-on-a-pony.” Full-throated in both his denunciation and approbation, he is quick to acknowledge in the preceding paragraph that “all our public freedoms and democratic rights depend on [this] secret and autocratic institution.”

In what was a surprising turn of events (to me at least), O’Rourke describes his pleasant visit to the Department of Transportation, an agency he intended to pick on as one abominable instantiation of the administrative bureaucracy. Far from being met by a bunch of safety obsessed Poindexters, O’Rourke was “embarrassed” to discover that “almost everyone who works for the [National Highway Traffic Safety Administration] owns a sports car… [and] are not only human but the same type of human as you are.”

Finally, in classic libertarian fashion, P.J. O’Rourke walks the reader through the largesse through the federal budget and explains his secret to balancing it: “remember that all tax revenue is the result of holding a gun to somebody’s head… therefore, every time the government spends money on anything, you have to ask yourself, ‘Would I kill my kindly, gray-haired mother for this?’” After asking himself this question and doing away with over $400B in federal “outlays”—which, not to be confused with “spending,” includes our most expensive entitlement programs—O’Rourke concludes that “ninety-five percent of Americans are on the mooch.” And you thought Mitt Romney’s forty-seven percent comment was incendiary.

Returning to the section with which I commenced this piece, which I’ll conservatively refer to as “…WHY DOES IT COST SO G-DD-MNED MUCH MONEY?” O’Rourke posits several explanations. First, in libertarian fashion O’Rourke recognizes the systemically racist boondoggle that is the failed war on drugs. Lest he be confused for a bleeding heart, he laments, in familiar conservative tones, that “a modern conviction requires just as much effort and tedium in court [as buying something at Bloomingdale’s with an out-of-state check].”

Next, O’Rourke endeavors to understand how, after spending a “combined federal, state and local antipoverty spending [of] $126 billion per year… according to the government’s own Congressional Research Service,” the war on poverty still hasn’t been won. His answer: the American welfare state has managed to “produce a combination of vandalized wealth and spoiled want,” resulting in “American slums [being] usually stylish places, their residents far up the fashion scale of evolution from the sack-assed, Brooks Brothered princes of Wall Street.” Reminiscent of Losing Ground by Charles Murray, O’Rourke describes that what “[him and his fatherless, impoverished family] managed to escape in 1966, in Squaresville, Ohio, was not poverty. We had that. What we managed to escape was help.”

In the remaining chapters of this particularly inflammatory section, P.J. O.’Rourke argues that: “agricultural policy formulated in 1794 [to] shoot farmers” may have been right the first time, as the present “U.S. farm policy is, along with North Korea and the Stanford liberal arts faculty, one of the world’s last outposts of anti-free-market dogmatism”; it comes “as no surprise to students of past U.S. foreign policy that the [Afghan] Alliance party with the greatest hatred for Western civilization and the worst reputation for brutality is the party that got the most American money”; and that an Aegis guided-missile cruiser is more of a benefit to the public than public benefits because, as “public school[s], public park[s], public health, [and] public housing” demonstrate, “to call something public is to define it as dirty, insufficient and hazardous.”

The penultimate section, if the reader has endured my ceaseless recitation of P.J. O’Rourke quotes and is somehow still reading, is one of the simplest: “SPECIAL INTEREST GROUPS: THE ORIGINAL BARREL OF MONKEYS THAT NOTHING IS MORE FUN THAN.” No surprise here; O’Rourke blames the aging (now aged) Baby Boomer generation as well as the “Perennially Indignant” for all but bankrupting the Treasury. But mostly the elderly. And for good reason: “current retirees are getting three to five times what they paid into Social Security,” there are fewer working-age Americans paying into Social Security, more beneficiaries of both Social Security and Medicare, which predicts “two thirds of the next century’s federal budget will be spent on the aged.”

The final section is, in my opinion, the most honest, insightful, and, ultimately, depressing: “AT HOME IN THE PARLIAMENT OF WHORES.” I’m sure many of the readers have heard the following quote bandied about, even if they were unaware P.J. O’Rourke was its progenitor: “When buying and selling are controlled by the legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are the legislators.” The corollary of this truism is less infuriating and considerably more disappointing, but even more necessary to recognize. The truth of the matter is, “in a democracy the whores are us.”

Despite the cantankerous tone O’Rourke assumes in his polemics, the vitality, humor, and adventurous spirit evident in his writing makes it clear that he was a happy warrior more than a cynical one. I lament that I will never be able to meet Mr. O’Rourke, who was taken from us too soon. On second thought, P.J made it pretty clear in Parliament of Whores that he was terrified of becoming one of those geriatric people driving our country off the cliff of insolvency. Moreover, his hilarious lampooning of sacred cows and institutions would not fly nowadays. In fact, the jet’s wings have been destroyed by surface-to-air missiles from the Aegis weapons system O’Rourke so admired and has been nose-diving for at least the past decade.

That said, I would like to issue a statement the likes of which has not been expressed by any other P.J. O.’Rourke obituary: he was taken from us too late; we shouldn’t have forced him to endure the past ten years of PC puritanism, cancel culture, and the general collapse of civil society that has been even worse than what O’Rourke saw cruising in with the Guardian Angels. Thus concludes my book review and obituary for one of the most eloquent and gut-busting writers of our time, the likes of which is not to be seen for a long, long time, if ever.