Age and Guile (beat youth, innocence and a bad haircut): 25 Years of P.J. O'Rourke
By P.J.O'Rourke
Picador (pb), $14.95
Reviewed by Dave Riley
All you classical scholars out there will know that satire has been around for quite some time. What with Petronious Arbiter (drinking companion of the Roman Emperor Nero) and Aristophanes (who died laughing in 385 BC) to fall back on, good, serviceable ridicule is as old as the city or nation state.
Fine wit harnessed against vice or folly is a hobby that humans are sure to indulge in given any worthwhile excuse. Tyranny will feed the satirical impulse as much as stupidity will.
But good satire is seldom a constant. It has its passionate moments and then seems suddenly quite passé. For a time anything — at least anything human — will appear fair game as the social world feeds its own sense of the ridiculous. These surges in sarcasm, hell bent on derision, arise when everyday humour is applied to social contradictions which seem suddenly more evident.
The Marx brothers may have had a great sense of the absurd, but they did not work — with each other — to satirise. Charlie Chaplin — working in a different epoch — by the time he got to Modern Times, did.
The difference lies perhaps in how much underlying bitterness fuels the impulse to laugh.
While much humour relies on exploring contradictions, satire goes further by injecting passion into the process. At its core, satire is about judgment as different moral outlooks collide. Thus critical and highly partisan, it screams out its response: this won't do, this is wrong, change it!
Dislike — even hate — is what satire is all about.
The high moral ground that generates satire in the first place often fosters its own cynicism. If the world of the rest of us appears so bad, then all it seems good for is a sorry excuse for laughter.
This bleak nihilism is satire's down side. Brutal wit, in a world devoid of allegiances, becomes an end in itself. For Jonathan Swift (the author of Gulliver's Travels and many other satires) the only way out of being so sentenced was to go quietly mad. Kurt Tucholsky — one of the best of the German inter-war satirical writers — chose suicide rather than the reality of Nazism.
So, despite the jibes and attacks they fulminate with glee, satirists tend to be living on the edge. If your business is criticism, then what's wrong with the world and the people in it is your preoccupation.
Maybe we should pity the poor satirist for living so large in our contradictions and being steeped in a hypocrisy that many of the rest of us seem so blithely unaware of. But if we have a notion to find out what's wrong with the world, it is to this profession we can turn to with confidence.
It is a pity, therefore, that your average would be satirist is a male university undergraduate with more smug ego than he knows what to do with. (Where would university newspapers be without them?) It is also a pity that satire's first born is oftentimes a know-all smartness.
That said, it is nonetheless important to extend generosity to any apprentice of the genre. Every satirist will one time or another go beyond the bounds of someone's good taste. What is important is how the package is pulled together over time.
Most satirists work up a cast of identifiable targets whose foibles are relentlessly pursued. For the great Austrian satirist, Karl Kraus, it was journalists. For today's feminist stand-up comedians, the category is much broader — men.
Without a clear target satire is not worthy of the name. A cynic's sarcasm is indiscriminate, but a satirist knows their quarry intimately. Through such knowledge is resonance achieved with an audience — even when target and audience are sometimes the same thing.
For many practitioners, satire is an indulgent form of retribution utilised to punish the milieus they themselves come from. The menagerie of characters developed by Barry Humphreys is of this kind. The knowledge put to use is of ones's own past as the narrative is replayed to suit the mocking edge now being pursued.
A similar approach is adopted by P.J. O'Rourke. But in O'Rourke's case his mark is quite calculated to offend all but the most rabidly right: "We have no ideology, no agenda, no catechism, no dialectic, no plan for humanity ... I don't know what's good for you. You don't know what's good for me ... We are participants in an enormous nonmarch on Washington — millions and millions of Americans not descending upon the nation's capital in order to demand nothing from the United States government. To demand nothing, that is, except the one thing which no government in history has been able to do — leave us alone."
This is militant rhetoric that prides itself on its libertarian impulse. For, despite the passage of the years, P.J. O'Rourke is still as radical as he claimed he was in his student days. Except, of course, he is now as ultraright as he once was ultraleft.
The wonderful logic of this change is fascinating and, in a warped way, O'Rourke deserves credit for a certain consistency. Like our very own P.P. McGuinness (are P.J. and P.P. related — if not by blood then maybe by proxy?), yesterday's long-haired bohemian hippy is but one side of the same coin now invested on the side of reaction.
And you know why? Because things started to go really wrong with the excesses of the '60s. "Because you remember what the Sixties led to", writes O'Rourke. "That's right. They led to the loathsome, disgusting repellent Seventies, which led to the unbelievably horrid, vicious, brutal, swinish now. And that's the worst thing of all about the Sixties — the one really unforgivable thing — that it's been straight downhill ever since."
This is good stuff — bluntly and boldly overstated, devoid of the reticence we'd normally associate with, say, a member of John Howard's cabinet* or the managing director of News Limited. You have got to give P.J. begrudging recognition — the so and so, despite his politics, has a handy way with words.
Nonetheless, O'Rourke's major problem is one of credibility. Handy, as he may be, in riding shotgun for the Republican right and giving baby boomers a dressing down in the pages of Rolling Stone, his allegiances are so grossly proclaimed that as a hired scribe of the establishment he now addresses us in uniform.
As he becomes more strident, his oratory approaches the gutter level of talkback radio so that the populist swill of reaction — so well orchestrated in the United States — is indistinguishable from his satirical pretensions.
This is a very interesting phenomenon and why I wanted to deal with O'Rourke in the pages of Green Left Weekly. Despite himself, the substance of O'Rourke's ranting congeals in the one individual so much of what we've been exposed to these last 25 years. If you suspect that maybe you've been had, your mind manipulated and your outlook engineered, catch up with the latest from P.J. O'Rourke because it's all there in black and white .
Inadvertently, within the pages of his prose you'll discover why today is such a bad time for satire. Because it relies so heavily on the possibility of something better than what we have to put up with, satire is dependent on the hopes and ideals thrown up by the hurly-burly of politics. Once the inevitability of the present social structure is accepted — the Reagan-Thatcher best-of-all-possible-worlds scenario — what's the point of criticising or ridiculing it? The joke is no longer on them but, unfortunately, on us.
* Ooops! After catching up with the views of the new Social Security minister, Jocelyn Newman, I obviously spoke too soon.