While everyone else is talking about how they discovered P.J. O’Rourke in his old Harvard Lampoon days, through his political and travel pieces in Rolling Stone or via his books, I first came across his writing in Automobile magazine.
O’Rourke had a long history of writing in Car and Driver and then Automobile (which was founded by former C/D editor David E. Davis, Jr. and some other writers from that magazine’s glory days) despite knowing very little about how cars actually worked. Or maybe precisely because of that.
Some of his best and funniest articles were written for these publications, including his recounting of a trip through Mexico in a huge Lincoln Town Car with a beautiful Czech photographer. He was concerned that white gringos in a baroque luxury car might draw some unwanted attention, but instead the locals called the Lincoln “el car boss.” (I can’t remember the exact line, but he wrote something like, “this says a lot about the good nature of the Mexican people. I’m not sure what it says about the Lincoln styling department.”)
The first O’Rourke article I came across was about the Audi 5000 “sudden acceleration” fiasco, when that pioneering German sport sedan was marked as a killer death machine that tended to take off on its own, as if possessed by the ghost of Bernd Rosemeyer. A deeply dishonest hit piece on 60 Minutes torpedoed sales, and even after investigations by several governments determined that this phenomenon was the result of driver error, it took decades for Audi to recover.
O’Rourke’s Automobile article featured the immortal line (I’m paraphrasing from memory once again) “yes, the dumb buggers stepped on the gas instead of the brake,” and was a searing indictment of how some unscrupulous lawyers and journalists created a moral panic. He also had some choice words for the Department of Transportation bending over backwards to absolve the drivers themselves while simultaneously admitting that their accidents were their own bloody fault. The piece was later republished as a chapter in his book Parliament of Whores.
I didn’t quite know what to make of O’Rourke after I read that, but I soon discovered some of his books, and my way of thinking and writing was changed forever. Holidays in Hell, recounting his trips to several hot spots, war zones, dictatorships and Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s theme park, was his masterwork. The chapter on Communist Poland, in particular, illustrated his greatness. It was darkly funny, but the ending was absolutely devastating:
We’re in an age where comedians, especially late-night talk show hosts, think they’re brave truth tellers and oracles of wisdom. I’d love to see any of them try to write something that packs a punch like this.
Heck, I’d love to see myself try to write like this. O’Rourke was a huge influence on my own writing style, but at best I’m the Dollarama knock-off version.
Though a longtime Republican, albeit a very libertarian, irreverent Republican, O’Rourke was no fan of Donald Trump and was clear-eyed about the danger he presented to the country. One of his last pieces, for the Cato Institute website, was about the appeal and false promise of populist pandering:
As someone who’s fond of loose living, charmed by alien customs, and having grandparents who, with alacrity, moved from the farm to the big city to escape the toilsome dullness of the agrarian way of life, I feel no affinity for the roots of populism or for any of the Donald Bernie Trump Sanders underbrush that has sprouted from its 19th century stump.
Populism is a muddle — a political, economic, and moral dog’s breakfast.
Which brings us back to that quote from Time, “…the politics of the little guy against the big guy — the classic struggle of the haves against the have‐nots or the have‐not‐enoughs.”
Populism is a lie and a logical sophistry. The very idea of the “struggle of the haves against the have‐nots” presupposes the zero‐sum fallacy that only a fixed amount of good things exist in the world, and I can only have more good things if I take them from you.
It’s the old “pizza delusion,” which you’ve probably heard explained before, but I’ll have it delivered again. To think of economics in terms of haves versus have‐nots is to look at the economy like a pizza — if you hog too many slices, I’ll have to eat the Domino’s box.
As hundreds of years of economic development — and the expansion of Domino’s from one store in Ypsilanti, Michigan in 1960 to more than 17,000 franchises today — proves, the answer is to make more pizza.
[…]
A populist is somebody offering democracy to a democracy, somebody saying, “I’ll give you a dollar for four quarters.” When you hear a proposition like that, you know something’s up, some con is being played.
O’Rourke was 74. My condolences to his friends and family. I miss him already, and I think we’re really going to miss him in the coming years.
This is wonderful! Thanks you!!!
Too bad O'Rourke's sage wisdom about the nature and reality of populism couldn't somehow be mainlined into the veins of every sentient individual in the Northern Hemisphere.