A Fair Trade Book
Title: Republican Party Reptile
Title: Republican Party Reptile
Author: P.J. O'Rourke
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
Date: 1987
ISBN: 0-87113-145-5
Length: 220 pages
Quote: “Sense of humor and
conservatism are not supposed to go together. There are some
well-known exceptions—William F. Buckley, Jr., R. Emmett Tyrrell,
Jr., and Pat Robertson—though there's always the possibility that
Pat Robertson is not kidding.”
Add to that list Aline Buckley,
Christopher Buckley, William Safire, Florence King, Glenn Beck, Rush
Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, Thomas Sowell, Jonah Goldberg, Ann Coulter,
Bill O'Reilly, not to mention Arianna Huffington in her Republican
phase, Dave Barry during Democrat administrations, or Senator Robert
Dole after work, and it becomes obvious that American conservatives
definitely have a sense of humor. Other conservatives have, however,
been known for using occasional bits of humor to keep their serious
writing from becoming grim or acrimonious. P.J. O'Rourke, who claims
to have dropped a lot of acid in the 1960s, is the only conservative
writer who's cultivated a reputation for clowning, for writing things
that are truly wacky.
On outing himself
as a Republican: “We look like Republicans, and think like
conservatives, but we drive a lot faster.”
On road-testing a
Ferrari: “Zoom, zoom, zip, zip, I couldn't have been happier if I'd
had a sack full of Iranian radicals to drag behind me.”
On a pop star of
the day: “I went...to see Freddie Aguilar, who's billed as 'the Bob
Dylan of the Philippines.' This is unfair, since he's good-looking,
plays the guitar well, can carry a tune, and writes songs that make
sense.”
On writing comedy:
“This was an important fifteen minutes for America. It was a
fifteen minutes of consolidation, of reflection, and of
self-realization. I, myself, realized how hungover I was and that I
had to go to the bathroom.”
On the inane things
some gun control advocates seem to believe: “The alarm went off
about half an hour late, and I pulled out the old Smith & Wesson
9mm automatic I keep under my pillow...they're going to kill me if
I'm late to work again. They killed a couple of other executives just
last week—hauled them into the freight elevator and shot them...I
couldn't find any clean shirts. And when I did find one it took me
twenty minutes to disarm the plastique charge...behind the shirt
cardboard...The mail hadn't come yet either. The doorman said there
was a company of Marines trying to get through with it, but they were
pinned down...I bet twenty snipers took a shot at me between my
building and the subway station.” (Fair disclosure: in this
exploration of how impossible the gun control advocates' fantasy is,
there's some disgusting, un-funny violence, but since I'm already
laughing out loud it doesn't register.)
We
were all so much younger in
the 1980s. We prided ourselves on being tough, able to handle
gross-outs and things that weren't family-filtered. It's my duty here
to tell anyone who does not already know that P.J. O'Rourke has
never, to my knowledge, written anything that
would make it through this web site's filter. He has enough talent
that he could be funny without any profanity, vulgarity, hatespeech,
or references to illegal acts. In the 1980s nobody asked him to
try—although after this book was published editors started sending
him to news sites around the world to give him more genuinely funny
material—and there's quite a lot of reference to illicit sex,
violence, hate, illegal drugs, and unacceptably messy things to do
with terrorists, in this and in all of O'Rourke's books.
Most of the time,
of course, he's joking. “[A] lack of death would result in an
extraordinary number of old people and the Social Security system is
already overextended. Therefore it is the duty of every patriotic,
moral, and humanistic person...to smoke, drink,drive...shoot guns,
own Corvairs, take saccharin, leave unmarked medicine bottles open
all over the house, get in fistfights, start barbecue fires with
gasoline, put dry-cleaner bags over our heads, and run around
barefoot without getting a tetanus shot.” A person who'd been
seriously practicing this belief for more than 27 years would not have written all of those more recent books.
However, the main
thing you need to know about P.J. O'Rourke, if you didn't already, is
that when he joined the Republican Party he did not join the Moral
Majority. I like this writer. I've collected all of his books. I'm
pretty sure some of the older members of the group known here as The
Nephews have read some of O'Rourke's books, and liked them; the ones
who've had access to my bookshelves know that I have, too. But we
don't talk about this. Over and above the reasonable idea that dead
babies aren't funny, and the less reasonable idea that things
published on the Internet are likely to be translated by computer
programs that make a remark as ordinary as “We clobbered School X
again” (literally meaning “We won 49-0”) come out like “We
violently attacked visitors from School X”...“Anything that makes
your mother cry is fun” (in an article about the joys of reckless
driving) is not the kind of comedy that can be shared between
generations.
O'Rourke
started out as a left-winger, and still has “a sneaking love of the
old-time left...Wobblies, Spanish Civil War veterans, the Hollywood
Ten.” In one of the longer articles collected here he was finally
able to take a “Peace Cruise” in the crumbling Soviet Union with
“Old Leftists. I expected them to be admirable and nasty, like
Lillian Hellman, or brilliant, mysterious, denying everything, like
Alger Hiss, or—best of all—hard-bitten and cynical but still
willing to battle oppression, like Rick in Casablanca.
I did not expect them to be the pack of thirty fussing geriatrics I
met...people who believed everything about the Soviet Union was
perfect, but they were bringing their own toilet paper.” Waking up
early one morning, he says, he “stumbled into the ship's bar” and
found himself drinking alone with two Soviets. Of his fellow
passengers he says, “'They are such great progressives I think I
have almost all of them talked into defecting.' 'No, no, no, no, no,'
said Nikolai.”
O'Rourke's
next three books, Holidays in Hell, Give War a Chance,
and All the Trouble in the World,
consisted mostly of travel stories. There are a few of those in
Republican Party Reptile as
well. In addition to the Volga River cruise, he reported on
anti-Marcos feeling in the Philippines, crime and vice in the Turks
and Caicos Islands, and waiting for the release of hostages held in
Beirut. O'Rourke was not yet a famous journalist and was not given
access to the most interesting stories (for instance, he didn't
actually get to see the hostages released) but he found raunchy
slapstick comedy everywhere.
This
book contains a full-length “product review” of the illegal drug
XTC that sounds as if O'Rourke tested the product. It contains ethnic
pejoratives (including some for Irish people) to express disrespect
more than hate; nobody else was saying things like “dago jeans”
in the 1980s, and I suspect O'Rourke did it just to rattle the cages
of the p.c., but he made it a sort of trademark. It contains barroom
stories, unlikely to be true, about things like drinking while
driving on ice while being fondled by a “crazy girl” whose
miniskirts “didn't even cover her underwear, when she wore
any.”O'Rourke intended to offend the Moral Majority type of
Republicans in every way; that he was a “reptile,” persona
non grata in their homes, is the
whole point of this book.
O'Rourke was still alive, last time I checked, so this is a Fair Trade Book. Regular readers know the drill: send salolianigodagewi @ yahoo.com $5 per copy of this book + $5 per package for shipping, we send O'Rourke or a charity of his choice $1. (You could probably fit four copies into a package, in which case you'd send us $25 and we'd send O'Rourke or his charity $4.)
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