Book Review: All the Trouble in the World

A Fair Trade Book

Title: All the Trouble in the World

Author: P.J. O'Rourke

Date: 1994

Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press

ISBN: 0-87113-580-9

Length: 341 pages

Quote: “Why do people spend so little time contemplating the ugliness of nature?”

In this book O'Rourke, caustic-witted car reviewer, satirist, and Gulf War reporter, set out to explore the global sites of “fashionable worries.”

The shade of his reactions is one I'd call “Bitter Green.” O'Rourke is writing as a disillusioned hippie turned Republican Party Reptile. (Not, however, too much of a reptile to receive aid and comfort from Christopher Buckley, John McCain, and half a dozen Republican organizations as well as the libertarian Cato Institute.)

In the 1990s right-wingers were as infatuated with certain pieces of ecological science that have since been debunked as left-wingers are infatuated with certain other pieces of ecological science that have been debunked today, and I've really tried to say with consistently equal patience to both of them, for a long time: You're wrong. And it's not just that I called the corrections where youall were wrong; it's that oldtimers like Wendell Berry and George Peters and J.I. Rodale called them first. O'Rourke consistently embraced the ideas that overpopulation might be fun and burning up all the gasoline was fun for him, too bad for future generations. So there are parts of All the Trouble in the World where my chuckles are at O'Rourke, not with him, and the smile on my face as I chuckle is probably the ugly kind.

But it's still laugh-out-loud funny. O'Rourke is easily among the top five laugh-out-loud-funny writers alive today. His zingers are delivered with neither real malice nor mercy to anybody on any side. He's willing to be the target of his own jokes if they have enough LOL potential. Often they do. He drinks lots of things that nature clearly intended humans to use for cleaning only. He gets sick. He narrates these experiences as if it were normal and acceptable to be sick whenever you were having “fun.” You have to wonder how much better this book would have been if O'Rourke had recognized the mild form of the Irish alcohol intolerance gene in himself and become a teetotal abstainer, but his descriptions of “hummingbirds that could actually carry a tune. Well, maybe that...was the haya huasca,” a fermented herb drink he sampled in South America, are funny anyway.

He raises questions about the emotional quality of contemporary concerns about overpopulation. His zingers on pages 58-63, where he argues that “Fretting about overpopulation is a perfectly guilt-free—indeed, sanctimonious—way for 'progressives' to be racists,” probably do apply to some of those who've fretted about overpopulation. (Note that they don't apply to this web site; we do fret about the observed effects of overpopulation—floating hostility, loss of community spirit, suppression of awareness of neighbors' survival needs, aggressive selfishness, commitment-phobia, inability to bond with friends or to mate for life, sterility and/or asexuality and/or homosexuality, chronic depression, “anger addiction,” many other forms of mental illness—among blue-eyed all-American yuppies. Often. We also think that living in slums contributes as much to the character defects of the welfare class as the welfare class contribute to the ugliness of the slums. Then again, we also trace the idea that birth control is something the neighbors should be doing through the animal kingdom; when overcrowded rats turn cannibalistic they will eventually eat their own young, but if they get a chance they'll eat other rats' young first.)

Famine? In Somalia he observed that there was a lot of food, but people were fighting over it. A load of rice identified as the gift of elementary school children—badgering their elders, hoarding their lunch money—had been commandeered and was being sold at obscene profits by public-spirit-impaired armed men. What O'Rourke saw was a far cry from the traditional Islamic norm, which also permeates the Old Testament, of rich people trying to get more of things in order to enjoy the “honor” of redistributing those things to the less wealthy. Generosity as a point of honor is an ideal valued in many cultures around the world but not, evidently, in nominally Muslim Somalia. Loyalty to other Muslims, “brotherhood,” as a point of religious observance also seems to have been broken down by some element of Somali culture. O'Rourke doesn't pretend to have even an educated guess what that element might be...at least he admits that what he did, when observing these global trouble zones, was to go to a country where he didn't speak the language, find another heavy-drinking man or group of men who spoke English, get drunk with them in the evenings, and write snarky hung-over descriptions of the landscapes and people he saw the next day. “But...[w]e had even more to drink and reasoned as hard as we could. Professor Amartya Sen says, 'There has never been a famine in any country that's been a democracy with a relatively free press'...Sylvia Nasar says, 'Modern transportation has made it easy to move relief supplies. but far more important are the incentives governments have to save their own people. It's no accident that the familiar horror stories...occurred in one-party states, dictatorships or colonies: China, British India, Stalin's Russia.'...Well, for the moment at least, Somalia certainly had a free press. The four of us were so free nobody even knew where we were.But how do you get Somalia one of those democratic systems...Sell the place to Microsoft?”

The environment? O'Rourke goes to the Amazonian rain forest to report that it's “an interesting, if sticky, place for rich people to visit. But...the employees of the ranches and timber companies and, for that matter, lots of the Yagua and Orejon wouldn't be there if they had another choice. The rain forest could then fester away in ecologically invaluable peace.” O'Rourke has always been one of your libertarian, basically-open-borders type of conservatives, not the anti-immigrant party—as am I—and hints that one way to save the rain forest might be letting more of its natives do unskilled labor in the U.S. He conveniently forgets the number of skilled workers in the U.S. who are desperate enough to do unskilled labor.

He also goes to Czechoslovakia, partly in order to provide a place in the book's outline where a preliminary witty debunking of Earth in the Balance will fit. He visits an alarmingly nasty toxic waste dump called Chabarovice, compares it with the famous traditional cleanness of Germany, and suggests that socialism contributes to the messiness of Chabarovice. This web site withholds comments.

He's on firmer ground, though, when he discusses the role of the federal government in mismanaging the United States' own ecological resources: “When resources are controlled by government instead of by an individual, the disposition of those resources is no longer guided by common—or any other kind of—sense...For example, the elk herd in Yellowstone National Park needs culling. But elk hunts cause uproar from the kind of people who think they'd like an elk for a pet. So all summer the elk eat everything in reach, destroy the Yellowstone ecological balance, and, come winter, they gruesomely starve.” 

And, “the Department of Agriculture...has been paying crop subsidies since 1927...the more you grow of something nobody wants, the more the government pays you for growing it. Thus farmers have been encouraged to heap their land with fertilizer and soak their crops in pesticide, and damn the costs, ecological or other­wise...The government has another method of keeping food prices high, through acreage-reduction programs. The Department of Agri­culture gives you cash for staying in bed and planting nothing. But, in order to get paid for not farming a piece of land, you have to prove that you used to farm it. So woods were cleared and swamps were drained anyway, to get money for leaving them alone later.” 

In short, “Government programs fail. There's no shame in this. Lots of things fail, as anyone who's over forty-five and has body parts knows. But government failures refuse to go away. When a private entity does not produce the desired results, it is (certain body parts excepted) done away with. But a public entity gets bigger.” Er, um...try sixty-five as the likely expiration date of those body parts if you say no to alcohol, as O'Rourke does not. (Grandma Bonnie Peters, who claimed between the ages of 55 and 80 to be healthier than she'd been at 35, is not typical even of teetotal abstainers—but neither is she really all that much of an outlier.) But as far as the government programs are concerned, check out a few for yourself and see how right our man P.J. was...and still is.

To study “Multiculturalism,” O'Rourke goes back to the college he attended. It's called Miami University, in Ohio. Miami, Florida, was named after a lot of dispossessed former residents of Ohio, several of whom wound up in Oklahoma. The university's sports teams were formerly nicknamed “Redskins.” O'Rourke reports that “Chief Floyd Leonard of the Miami Tribe in Oklahoma said he is not making any public comments,” as of 1993, possibly because “whether varsity squads are called Redskins or Dust Kittens, Miamis themselves would not be welcome to roam southwestern Ohio again—pitching their wigwams beside calm blue backyard swimming-pool waters, hunting and gathering midst the rich bounty of Safeway aisles...” Ironically, although the non-Miamian, “pink and well-fed” students see nothing derogatory or appropriative or whatever about the name “Miami,” they holler that “'Redskin' makes me cringe...the fact that we're here to discuss this today shows that there's something wrong with the word.” A Lakota activist living in Dayton, Ohio, “was very angry” and claimed the Lakota reservation's “as much as 92% unemployment, as much as 47% alcoholism rate” existed “because White Americans think it's good to call us 'Redskins,'” an extraordinary logical leap. The team has been renamed, of course, just because people got tired of the logic-free harangues, and the benefit to needy Hopis (or even Miamis) has been: zero. I'll stop now.

Meanwhile, “In the fall of 1992 I went to see multiculturalism in practice in former Yugoslavia. there all manner of diverse cultural groups were fully empowered—with guns.” O'Rourke's narrative of this trip is just one great gorgeous irony after another.

To discuss “Plague,” he goes to Haiti. It is unlikely that a conservative writer has ever written so fondly of this troubled nation as O'Rourke does, before, or ever will again. His narrative concludes with “All I could manage was 'Thank you.' But what I really wanted to tell the voodoo celebrants was 'I wish all of you could come to the United States and live there. You're an immense improvement on the other people who go to Florida.”

Right...if O'Rourke were reading this book to a large mixed audience the reading would now need to pause for while Cuban-Americans pelted O'Rourke with wadded-up programs. But his sympathy for his Haitian hosts is contagious. I know for a fact that, fifteen years later, when Associated Content was doing a fundraiser in aid of Haiti, my contributions to the barrage of fundraising articles were informed and inspired by memories of Chapter 8 of All the Trouble in the World. I cited more recent reportage, but O'Rourke's was the story that had stuck in my mind.

For the grand finale chapter on “Economic Justice,” O'Rourke, who famously dodged the draft during the Vietnam War by telling the recruiting doctor he'd used all kinds of illegal drugs, finally goes to Vietnam, where he reports, “never has there been such a pure, uncon­cealed, all-hogs-to-the-trough rush into capitalism among the citizens of a supposedly collectivist society.” Yet, “in the end, Vietnam was a bit depressing, too...the thrilling idea of human liberty always results in people acting so...human. Like Americans.”

In the end O'Rourke's travel book is hilarious (I've reread it every two or three years since 1994 and I still laugh out loud), picturesque, lively...and subjective, because it's one traveller's story...and historic. He saw things happening in 1993. That's not what's happening now. Then again, although some of his observations are date-stamped to the precise day, some of them are more “evergreen” than might have seemed possible in 1994.

I think this may be my favorite O'Rourke book. It's hard to say. The Bachelor Home Companion was also hilarious, and Eat the Rich has much to recommend it. Which is your favorite?

If you don't yet have a favorite, or aren't yet familiar with O'Rourke's earlier books, you can buy them here for $5 per book, $5 per package, plus $1 per online payment, from which this web site will direct $1 per book to the author or a charity of his choice.