Book Review: Give War a Chance

A Fair Trade Book

Title: Give War a Chance

Author: P.J. O'Rourke

Date: 1992

Publisher: Atlantic Monthly

ISBN: 0-87113-520-5

Length: 233 pages

Quote: “This book is a collection of articles about...evil ends, evil means, evil effects and causes...Not that I meant to do anything so grand. I was just writing magazine pieces, trying to make a living, and evil is good copy.”

The last section of the book contains O'Rourke's observations of the Gulf War for Rolling Stone, and are valuable as history even if O'Rourke did not observe much more than the people watching the war on television. It was a short successful war, not much to see actually, mostly fought using technology, mostly televised, most damage done to the U.S. forces by the technology—unless we count the current “War On Terrorism” and Timothy McVeigh. O'Rourke didn't watch the computer error but did watch the explosions. Apart from the explosions, what he saw that we missed was that the desert was boring and the troops were bored. (O'Rourke described the young soldiers' willingness to work as a good thing and made favorable noises about the young, but what I read him describing is boredom.)

Before that he visited some other trouble zones: Berlin when the Wall came down, Ireland demonstrating the benefits of a gun control policy, Paraguay emerging from the Stroessner dictatorship with an election, Nicaragua during Chamorro's election, “a larval stage of private enterprise” in Kiev and Tbilisi. He snarked at the “We Are the World” fundraising effort. He read Flavius Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews, which he thought “does lend a fullness and a depth to our incomprehension” of the Middle East. He resented drug tests. He vented crowd-craziness, reacting to a popular T-shirt motif showing someone bashing an empty vehicle with a hammer (“One Less Car”) with “An Argument in Favor of Automobiles vs Pedestrians.” He was turned off by Dr. Ruth Westheimer. He did not, as many people did in the 1980s, become a fan of Lee Iacocca, nor did he appreciate the inspirational folksiness of the Carters' Everything to Gain.He published an official “Enemies List.”

O'Rourke reports a real problem in Paraguay. “Journalists aren't supposed to praise things. It's a violation of work rules almost as serious as buying drinks with our own money...[I]f a journalist shows a facility for praise he's liable to be offered a job in public relations...but I can't help myself. Even a...foreign correspondent has to like something sometime, and I like Paraguay.”

But at least he could sneer at a wholesome, cheerful book about retirement: “The object...is to find the dumbest sentence in Everything to Gain...[N]o one has yet been able to top the gem...on page: 59: 'I have worked with the problems of the mentally afflicted for years, ever since I first became aware of the needs while campaigning for Jimmy for Governor.'”

I like Everything to Gain. I'll admit, though, that my eyes had skimmed over that sentence before O'Rourke held it up for ridicule.

So...spotting a blooper in a nice book about niceness belongs in a book “about evil”? Say whaaat? Is O'Rourke claiming to believe that it's evil for retired people to do charity work, or that it's evil for reviewers to spot a blooper in a nice book about niceness? If you first read it in the context of O'Rourke's other books, you know that the answer is: “This book is a hodgepodge of as many short pieces as O'Rourke could shove into his new book to fulfill a contract to produce—was it three, four, or five?--large and hilarious books in the same number of years. It's not about anything. It came from all through the 1980s and, so far as they'd gone, the 1990s, and its theme is 'People laughed at this.'” And if O'Rourke had published this book first, I'm not sure that there would have been any contract; he'd written better books before, and he's written better books since.

But it's all funny in a patchy, spotty way, and this book's real claim to fame is a zinger that really ought to have laid the “conservatives = fascists” lie to rest forever: “I have often been called a Nazi, and, although it is unfair, I don't let it bother me...No one has ever had a fantasy about being tied to a bed...by someone dressed as a liberal.”

People who fantasize about going to bed with or as hippies don't usually imagine that they'd need to be tied, but still...Let's make it official: The policy of this web site is henceforward that anyone who confuses conservatives with fascists is compulsively confessing a secret yearning to be tied to a bed and forced, at stiletto-heel-point, to eat my panties. And I don't buy the spun-sugar kind.

Other zingers abound. The one that seems to have become the national anthem of Young America appears in the war reports. It's been confirmed by non-comedy sources that the Gulf War was a high-tech war, and that playing silly, violent video games, as deplored (prior to the war) by almost any adult who didn't own a video arcade, helped prepare the troops for high-tech combat. Was the Gulf War won on Donkey Kong and Pac-Man screens? “Gaming” instantly gained social status, anyway, and Give War a Chance contains one of the original jokes that spread the word that video games had just become a worthwhile pastime. For those looking forward to a military career, anyway.

How accurate is war reportage in terms of actual military history? We've all seen some events where, as the whole story emerged, it turned out to be quite different from the TV news video clips and sound bites. Give War a Chance is reportage not history, but it's a primary text, so it's still worth reading if you're seriously studying the history of the Gulf War.

But mostly this book is likely to appeal to those who share, or would like to share, that “Irish” feeling that evil can often be overcome merely by laughing at it; at least, laughing at it's worth a try.

Give War a Chance is a Fair Trade Book. Buy it here, for $5 per book plus $5 per package plus $1 per online payment, and we'll send $1 to O'Rourke or a charity of his choice. Three more of his fatter early books, possibly more if you want to begin with Bachelor Home Companion and Republican Party Reptile, will fit into the package for one $5 shipping charge; if you buy them that way you can get four laugh-out-loud funny volumes for $25 (or $26), and O'Rourke or his charity gets $4.