The other day, some one posted a link to this post by the late Larry Auster. I was not a frequent reader of Larry’s while he was alive, but I have read more of his work since his death. It’s a funny thing. I should have been a big fan of his work, but there’s only so many hours in a day and you can’t follow everyone. That and a dozen years ago I was a little wore down by paleo-con moaning about George Bush.
Anyway, his commentary about Jonah Goldberg reminded me that it has been a long time since I’ve read Goldberg. I was a regular reader up until his first book, which I thought was very good. If you want a good primer on 20th century Progressive history, it is a good option. Up until that point, Jonah was an irreverent slacker smart-ass, but after he wrote a book he tried to turn himself into a very serious person, which was a good decision. The money is better.
A couple of years ago he tried to get back to being an irreverent smart-ass again with his G-File columns, but they were painfully unfunny so I stopped reading them. They just felt hackneyed and corny, like seeing an old comic try to do his act after 20 years away from the stage. Tastes change, people change, the dogs bark and the caravan moves on. All humorists have their time and once it is gone, they start to sound, well, hackneyed and corny.
A good example of that is P.J. O’Rourke, who has always struck me as a nasty, self-absorbed d-bag. Maybe there was a time when he was funny, but I’ve never stumbled upon an example of it. I’m told he was hilarious at National Lampoon when he penned stuff like this. There’s no accounting for taste, but there was never a time in my life when that was funny to me, not even as a child when cornball humor goes over well.
The other day the twitter machine was buzzing with this column written by O’Rourke that may be humor or maybe not. I really can’t tell. It just reads like a bitter old man saying nasty things about someone out of jealousy.
Toward Ann Coulter I had always taken a “suffer little children to come unto me” attitude. Not that she ever came on to me or anything. It’s just that she’s a kid. She was born in 1961. I’ve got skinny Brooks Brothers neckties in the back of my closet older than that.
Hilarious. O’Rourke is pointing out that he he very old and has old stuff. That’s a real knee-slapper.
Ann Coulter grew up during the “I-was-conservative-after-conservatism-was-cool” era, helping found the Cornell Review in the early 1980s. She’s noisy and she gives me a headache. But kids are, and kids do. I have several.
Actually, the 1980’s was pretty much when “conservatism” became cool. It’s also when he decided his left-leaning hippy routine was becoming dated so he went with the libertarian shtick.That way, he could make fun of the lefties, but also play the old crowd by mocking the Right. To quote myself, libertarianism is standing on the sidelines and pretending it is on principle.
That last line is a classic insecure old-manism. Coulter is a middle-aged woman so calling her a kid allows the old fart to dismiss her like a servant. It’s a defense mechanism you see with old men who fear they can no longer keep up. O’Rourke is not a dunce so he knows he is a yesterday man and he is bitter about it.
The rest of it is mostly sad. Writing is not a young man’s game, but it is not geriatric man’s game either. Some guys stay fresh well into their dotage or they stick to subjects where being a geezer works well. But, all of us lose our fastball eventually. For a guy that is mostly getting by on shtick, the fastball goes early. If O’Rourke ever had a fastball, it is long gone.
Of course, The Weekly Standard is not trying to send a fastball at Coulter’s head. They just want to let her know to take it easy on the Jew stuff. This brush back was more like throwing behind the batter so you know he won’t get hit, but he’ll get the message. Having the old washed up guy do it is safe because even if he plunks her, nothing is going to come of it.
I enjoyed “Holidays in Hell”, too. And I did think that “Foreigners around the World” was pretty funny. But sadly I think the Z-Man is on to something here.
Ahh, man, you know; Parliament of Whores is one of the funniest anti govt. books ever written.
Not every pitch has to be a strike, you know
Other than that, keep up the good work.
I read PoW on a flight from NY to Cincinnati…I was laughing so hard other passengers were turning around to see what was funny. I held up the book so they could read the title
I’ll give you that one, but that was 25 years ago too. And the category of “humorous anti-government books” is pretty small. Still, O’Rourke is just not very funny and he has been decidedly unfunny for a long time. My sense is that “satirists and humorists” are mostly mean spirited dickheads who try to knock off the hard edges with a little humor. Their point is never to make you laugh.
My first response was “What about PoW? That was a blazing fastball!”……..but I see other batters have already jumped on it. Just prior to PoW, his Republican Party Reptile was good, and he had a couple fair ones in the 90s. But agree on your overarching point – PJ is hitting 0-for-the-millennium.
A truly conservative Jew, like Auster, and there are dozens of them, does not shirk from the fact that the natural state of Jewish politics is ruinous to liberty. It would be amusing to watch the arc of that progressive boomerang as it comes back behind them to take their heads off, as in France, if it weren’t coming for me also. But they do their thing whatever the cost and then move on, not to repeat the German mistake. I understand the sentiment, though. If there were a place to move on to, I would. This at one time was a county in which that could be done. I would have it back.