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Title: Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government by P. J. O'Rourke, Andrew Ferguson ISBN: 0-8021-3970-1 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: February, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.45 (44 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: belly laughs and common sense
Comment: (...)
Among the current crop of humorists, P. J. O'Rourke is one of the very best. Though it must be acknowledged that he's operating in a target rich environment, his stories of government stupidity, overreach, waste, and arrogance are truly funny. He's pretty much a libertarian, though made uncomfortable by many of the social behaviors that it would allow and overly enamored of the armed forces, so he's just as likely to light out after stupid Republican ideas as he is to castigate Democrats. Parliament of Whores finds him in the perfect position to flail both, as he follows George Bush the elder to Washington in 1989, and sets out to examine the entire U. S. government.
Unsuspecting readers may assume that O'Rourke is just going to snidely lambaste bureaucrats, politicians, institutions, and government generally, but that assumption really underestimates him. He's after much bigger game, as he reveals in the title of the book :
Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us.
The various government employees and elected officials actually come out looking pretty good. As portrayed by O'Rourke, they seem for the most part to be genuinely dedicated to their work and trying to do the best they can. It is the American people who come out of this looking pretty awful. Time and again, as he shows how useless, wasteful, and outrageously expensive the myriad government programs are, O'Rourke also makes it clear that they exist, and exist at such bloated sizes, because they have constituencies. And those constituencies are not the easily caricatured and vilified underclass, they are more often the regular work-a-day middle classes. You don't end up with a government as elephantine as ours unless those folks, we folks, in the broad middle have a huge appetite for government services.
In what I think is the best chapter in the book, "Protectors of a Blameless Citizenry," O'Rourke tracks a terrific example of this : the demand for government investigation of sudden-acceleration incidents (SAIs). If you recall the hysteria, this was the allegation that some vehicles, when you were just parked innocently in your garage, would suddenly lurch forward into a garage wall. Any objective observer could have taken one look at these SAIs and figured out that they were merely episodes where people shifted into Drive without their foot on the brake, or stepped on the gas pedal instead of the brake. But to draw such a conclusion would have meant blaming people, blaming taxpayers, blaming voters, for their own carelessness and stupidity, and that would be intolerable. Instead, it has become the particular duty of government to absolve us of blame for such manifestations of our own ineptitude, recklessness, and stupidity.
P.J. O'Rourke is a national treasure, if for no other reason than this willingness to hold us all up to well deserved ridicule. The troubling question that he raises in this book, one which Alexis de Tocqueville made in rather more measured tones in Democracy in America, is whether democracy is ultimately doomed by this very phenomenon, of the citizenry trying to avoid responsibility for their own lives. Once the people in a democracy realize that they can simply blame others for all of the problems in their lives, even those of their own making, the democracy is morally doomed. And worse, as Alexander Tytler said some 200 years ago, in a quote that O'Rourke cites :
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until a majority of
voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse out of the
Rating: 5
Summary: Hard-Hitting, Politically Incorrect and Totally Accurate!
Comment: This is what I call a good use of humor - to kick the tail end of Big Government and all its Liberal fans. O'Rourke does take shots at Conservatives where they demonstrate their hypocrisy over calls for "smaller government." But, by and large, this book is a scathing denouncement of the Liberal Washington Establishment, which exists to employ and fancy the whims of intellectual élites who think they can run the United States from their bureaucratic central controls better than individual American citizens can run their own lives. O'Rourke is refreshingly irreverent and politically incorrect. It reminds me of years past when a person could speak their mind without worrying over self-appointed censors crying foul. O'Rourke hears the censors but he just doesn't care. Good for him! I hope to read more of his Establishment drubbing and I look forward to scoffing at more manufactured outrage from the Left.
Rating: 5
Summary: No finer civics lesson available
Comment: P.J. O'Rourke is hands down the single funniest polticial observer in recent memory and (even though he's a Republican) very good at what he does...which is tell you why the government is so f-ed up.
I first read this book a little less than a year ago, and it's been probably my favorite of P.J.'s more cohesive works (of the obvious grab-bag of essays, it's either Rep Party Reptile or Age and Guile). Sure, you won't agree with everything he says (if you are of the Sean Hannity, "I Must Agree With Everything The Repubs Do Because They Are Never Wrong" mindset, this isn't a book for you), but you have a great time reading it. One of the other reviewers called reading this book a "guilty pleasure", and I think that applies well for those of us left-of-center who still like a good laugh every now and then.
But there's some serious stuff here too, couched between the wit: I won't repeat the words here, but his analogy concerning the drug war hyperbole is astute and saddingly accurate. The budget chapter strikes out any cash for the National Guard, as O'Rourke had friends at Kent State (in a rather weak-kneed footnote, Peej decides his budget needs revision due to the Gulf War breaking out after he wrote it, it feels tacked-on and possibly a retreat from his earlier stance).
Overall, this is P.J.'s best work, one that satirizes everyone in Washington who is wasting space. Written during the first Bush's administration, it's gleefully disrespectful to that era's mindset and makes you savor what bad things P.J. might have to say about the current Dumbass-in-Chief. On some levels, this is a product of its time, but it still holds up well enough to be read long after anyone remembers who the hell any of the leaders were.
I have to credit PJ with giving me the desire to write, and while I heartily disagree with him politically the man has common sense, and there's still a streak of libretarianism in me left over from my youth in the Republican-dominated South. This is O'Rourke's best, and it could've been written today and still say the same things. A fantastic read from a fantastic (and funny) voice in American society.
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Title: Eat the Rich by P. J. O'Rourke ISBN: 0871137607 Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press Pub. Date: September, 1999 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: All the Trouble in the World: The Lighter Side of Overpopulation, Famine, Ecological Disaster, Ethnic Hatred, Plague, and Poverty by P. J. O'Rourke ISBN: 0871136112 Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press Pub. Date: September, 1995 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Holidays in Hell by P. J. O'Rourke ISBN: 0802137016 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: July, 2000 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Give War a Chance by P.J. O'Rourke ISBN: 0679742018 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 27 April, 1993 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Modern Manners: An Etiquette Book for Rude People by P. J. O'Rourke ISBN: 087113375X Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press Pub. Date: June, 1990 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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