To those who think life is a comedy.
    To those who feel life is a tragedy.
        -Horace Walpole

    Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boy.
        -Parliament of Whores

Humor and conservatism go hand in hand.  Firstly, conservatives are just a bunch of fat self-satisfied louts anyway, exactly the kind of people who find the misfortunes of others hilarious.  Second, humor, which cuts people down to size, puncturing their presumptions, and humbling them, fits in perfectly with the conservative understanding of Man's relative insignificance, and men's incompetence.  It is precisely because we are all a load of bumbling fools that we should not allow one group of dolts to dictate to the rest.  Only liberals, who believe in the infinite capacity of their own minds to determine solutions to problems and implement them effectively, have the temerity to suggest that person A should, or can, make decisions for persons B, C, & D.  They are all earnestness and credulity, while we are all skepticism.

Which brings us to the second general objection, that there are no conservative wits.  Asked to name a few, here's the list I came up with off the top of my head :  Mark Twain, H. L. Mencken, Calvin Coolidge, P. G. Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh, Winston Churchill, W. C. Fields, E. B. White, James Thurber, Bob Hope, Frank Capra, Jean Shepherd, Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole, Christopher Buckley, P. J. O'Rourke, Joe Queenan, Andrew Ferguson, etc.  Though it's not uniformly true, it is generally so, that most of these men derived much of their material from looking askance at government.  And here we see why it is that there are so many more funny conservatives than liberals : liberals are basically cut off from that rich source of material.  Imagine that liberals and conservatives are "playing the dozens," should the liberal point out the truly comic waste at the Defense Department, the conservative will be more than happy to concede the point, after all, the military is just another branch of government, and to acknowledge the general incompetence of government.  Suppose our imaginary liberal comic decries the inequities of the tax code; fine--we agree--scrap it.  And so on.  Therefore, they've ceded this territory to conservatives, who have proceeded to do much with it.

Among the current crop of humorists, P. J. O'Rourke is one of the very best.  Though it must be acknowledged that he's operating in a target rich environment, his stories of government stupidity, overreach, waste, and arrogance are truly funny.  He's pretty much a libertarian, though made uncomfortable by many of the social behaviors that it would allow and overly enamored of the armed forces, so he's just as likely to light out after stupid Republican ideas as he is to castigate Democrats. Parliament of Whores finds him in the perfect position to flail both, as he follows George Bush the elder to Washington in 1989, and sets out to examine the entire U. S. government.

Unsuspecting readers may assume that O'Rourke is just going to snidely lambaste bureaucrats, politicians, institutions, and government generally, but that assumption really underestimates him.  He's after much bigger game, as he reveals in the title of the book :

    Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us.

The various government employees and elected officials actually come out looking pretty good.  As portrayed by O'Rourke, they seem for the most part to be genuinely dedicated to their work and trying to do the best they can.  It is the American people who come out of this looking pretty awful.  Time and again, as he shows how useless, wasteful, and outrageously expensive the myriad government programs are, O'Rourke also makes it clear that they exist, and exist at such bloated sizes, because they have constituencies.  And those constituencies are not the easily caricatured and vilified underclass, they are more often the regular work-a-day middle classes.  You don't end up with a government as elephantine as ours unless those folks, we folks, in the broad middle have a huge appetite for government services.

In what I think is the best chapter in the book, "Protectors of a Blameless Citizenry," O'Rourke tracks a terrific example of this : the demand for government investigation of sudden-acceleration incidents (SAIs).  If you recall the hysteria, this was the allegation that some vehicles, when you were just parked innocently in your garage, would suddenly lurch forward into a garage wall.  Any objective observer could have taken one look at these SAIs and figured out that they were merely episodes where people shifted into Drive without their foot on the brake, or stepped on the gas pedal instead of the brake.  But to draw such a conclusion would have meant blaming people, blaming taxpayers, blaming voters, for their own carelessness and stupidity, and that would be intolerable.  Instead, it has become the particular duty of government to absolve us of blame for such manifestations of our own ineptitude, recklessness, and stupidity.

P.J. O'Rourke is a national treasure, if for no other reason than this willingness to hold us all up to well deserved ridicule.  The troubling question that he raises in this book, one which Alexis de Tocqueville made in rather more measured tones in Democracy in America, is whether democracy is ultimately doomed by this very phenomenon, of the citizenry trying to avoid responsibility for their own lives.  Once the people in a democracy realize that they can simply blame others for all of the problems in their lives, even those of their own making, the democracy is morally doomed.  And worse, as Alexander Tytler said some 200 years ago, in a quote that O'Rourke cites :

    A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government.  It can only exist until a majority of
    voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse out of the public treasury.

Surely, this combination of unwillingness to accept responsibility and eagerness to accept unearned wealth must eventually banrupt a nation, financially and morally.

By all means read this book for the belly laughs it contains, but for goodness sake be cognizant of the broader political message, to paraphrase Pogo : we have met the whores, and they is us.

(Reviewed:05-Apr-01)

Grade: (A) Orrin C. Judd

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