“Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.” That chuckle-inducing aphorism nicely sums up both the philosophy and style of Patrick Jake O’Rourke, who died last week. He was 74, but he’d tell you he maintained the maturity of a 14-year-old, just with bad knees.
O’Rourke’s death was a shock not just to his fellow baby boomers, whose indulgences, quirks, and proclivities he relished skewering with rapier wit but for those of us who came of age reading his prose. I’ll always remember my high school librarian’s slipping me All the Trouble in the World, practically in a brown paper bag, and with a wink, whispering, sotto voce, “I know you’re something of a free-thinker.”
O’Rourke spared nobody’s sacred cows, but he did so in a way that entertained and educated. And he’d make it look easy, blending rare talent and supreme effort, clacking away on his IBM Selectric typewriter (because computers were too distracting, particularly the ones attached to those newfangled internet tubes).
A self-described child of the ’60s, he quickly moved from youthful antiwar hippie to perhaps the keenest expositor of public-choice economics and libertarian politics. To this day, there’s no better book for understanding how the government works than the No. 1-bestselling Parliament of Whores. For foreign policy, try another No. 1 bestseller, Give War a Chance. And if you want to know why some countries remain poor and others have escaped that fate, pick up Eat the Rich.
O’Rourke became America’s leading political satirist because he realized, decades before all the Twitter-come-latelys, that Washington was more Veep than West Wing. Foibles don’t stop being foibles when committed by those in office or sporting coveted White House hard passes. Good intentions don’t remedy incompetence, repeal the force of incentives, or prevent unintended consequences.
A humorist in the tradition of Mark Twain and Will Rogers, O’Rourke was in on the joke, mocking himself for being part of a mockable culture. That’s a lot harder to do well than the model Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and other latter-day sophists adopted, where all they had to humor was their audiences’ predispositions.
O’Rourke’s writing tracked his life progression, from the collegiate National Lampoon franchise through a how-to guide for bachelors, the trials and tribulations of an ambitious professional to parenthood and financial advice. He’d be the first to admit that such a self-indulgent career arc epitomizes the boomer generation that he ultimately blamed for getting us into “this mess.” “But hey,” he’d add, “write what you know.”
And O’Rourke knew a lot. In addition to long-standing gigs at the Atlantic and Weekly Standard, he wrote for Playboy, Car and Driver, Vanity Fair, and Men’s Journal. He’s the only writer I can imagine who could be published in both House & Garden and Garden & Gun. He even managed to snag a job as the foreign correspondent for Rolling Stone, which he leveraged for free trips to war zones and other places about as far removed from the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle as you could get.
P.J. practiced gonzo journalism with smiles, not sneers. It’s in that spirit that I got to know him, when he joined a satirical brief the Cato Institute filed in a Supreme Court case involving a law making it illegal to “lie” about politicians. You can imagine what he thought about a bunch of bureaucrats deciding whether a statement crossed the Pinocchio line.
I liked to joke that, as an honorary fellow, O’Rourke was worth everything Cato paid him. He’d reply that, as a pro bono attorney, I too was worth every penny.
It’s somehow appropriate that O’Rourke’s last book was A Cry from the Far Middle, trying to make sense of a public discourse gone off the rails.
The world is less funny in O’Rourke’s absence. But it is also much less wise.
Ilya Shapiro, who was P.J. O’Rourke’s lawyer on half a dozen briefs, is the author of Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America’s Highest Court.
