A Cry From the Far Middle E-Book

P. J. O'Rourke

• Herausgeber: Grove Press UK
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

P.J. O'Rourke says we've worked ourselves into a state of anger and perplexity, and it's no surprise because perplexed and angry is what America has always been all about. This uproarious look at the current state of the United States includes essays like 'The New Puritanism - and Welcome to It,' about the upside of being 'woke' (and unable to get back to sleep); 'Sympathy vs. Empathy,' which considers whether it's better to have an idea of how people feel or to bust their skulls to get inside their heads; 'A Brief Digression on the Additional Hell of the Internet of Things' because your juicer is sending fake news to your FitBit about what's in your refrigerator; and many more. A couple of extra perks include a quiz to determine where you stand on the spectrum of 'Coastals vs. Heartlanders' and a 'An Inauguration Speech I'd Like To Hear:' ask not what your country can do for you. Ask me how I can get the hell out of here. Featuring extensive coverage from the 2020 campaign trail, this is P.J. at his acerbic best.

Leseprobe

ALSO BY P. J. O’ROURKE

Modern Manners

An Etiquette Book for Rude People

The Bachelor Home Companion

A Practical Guide to Keeping House Like a Pig

Republican Party Reptile

Confessions, Adventures, Essays, and (Other) Outrages

Holidays in Hell

In Which Our Intrepid Reporter Travels to the World’s Worst Places and Asks, “What’s Funny About This?”

Parliament of Whores

A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government

Give War a Chance

Eyewitness Accounts of Mankind’s Struggle Against Tyranny, Injustice, and Alcohol-Free Beer

All the Trouble in the World

The Lighter Side of Overpopulation, Famine, Ecological Disaster, Ethnic Hatred, Plague, and Poverty

Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut

“I Was Tragically Hip and I Recovered! You Can Too!”

Eat the Rich

A Treatise on Economics

The CEO of the Sofa

One Year in the Life of a Man Who Said, “Mind If I Put My Feet Up?

I Think I Will Take This Lying Down.”

Peace Kills

America’s Fun New Imperialism

On the Wealth of Nations

A Minor Mister Opines upon a Master’s Magnum Opus

Driving Like Crazy

Thirty Years of Vehicular Hell-Bending Celebrating America the Way It’s Supposed to Be—With an Oil Well in Every Backyard, a Cadillac Escalade in Every Carport, and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Mowing Our Lawn

Don’t Vote—It Just Encourages the Bastards

A Treatise on Politics

Holidays in Heck

A Former War Correspondent Experiences Frightening Vacation Fun

The Baby Boom

How It Got That Way . . . And It Wasn’t My Fault . . . And I’ll Never Do It Again

Thrown Under the Omnibus

A Reader

How the Hell Did This Happen?

The Election of 2016

None of My Business

P.J. Explains Money, Banking, Debt, Equity, Assets, Liabilities, and Why He’s Not Rich and Neither Are You

First published in the United States of America and Canada in 2020 by Grove Atlantic

This hardback edition first published in Great Britain in 2020 by Grove Press UK, an imprint of Grove Atlantic

Copyright © P.J. O’Rourke, 2020

The moral right of P.J. O’Rourke to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

Some chapters have been previously published in American Consequences.

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN 978 1 61185 643 9

Trade paperback ISBN 978 1 61185 456 5

E-book ISBN 978 1 61185 894 5

Printed in Great Britain

Grove Press UK

Ormond House

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WC1N 3JZ

www.groveatlantic.com

To Andrew Ferguson

Great writer, great friend, great guide in the political wilderness with whom I have explored the savage land of the Yahoos and with whom I still hope to discover the lost country of the Houyhnhnms

“Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, Here I am, stuck in the middle with you.”

—Stealers Wheel

CONTENTS

Pre-Preface: As We Go to Press . . .

Preface: Manifesto for Extreme Moderation

Introduction: O Beautiful for . . . Pilgrim Feet?

One Nation—Divided as Hell

Coastals vs. Heartlanders

Goodbye to Classical Liberalism . . .“It’s the End of the World!”

Big Fat Politics

But Thank You Anyway, Partisan Politicians

Robin Hood Arithmetic

On the Other Hand . . .Just Give Them the Money

It’s Time to Make Rich People Uncomfortable Again

Negative Rights vs. Positive Rights It’s Positively Confusing

Sympathy vs. Empathy Is It Better to Hold People’s Hands or Bust into Their Heads?

Patriotism vs. Nationalism

Big Brother (and Everybody Else) Is Watching You Thoughts on Rereading 1984

Whose Bright Idea Was It to Make Sure That Every Idiot in the World Was in Touch with Every Other Idiot?

A Brief Historical Digression on How Communication Has Devolved

And While I’m Ranting Against the Digital Age Let Me Not Forget to Excoriate an Aspect of Social Media that Lacks Even Sociability . . .On the Fresh Hell of The Internet of Things

Lessons in Fake News from Two Old Masters of the Form

Woke to the Sound of Laughter

Why Kids ᴙ Commies And Never Mind How the Free Market Bankrupted that Backwards R Big Box Store that Once Held a Greedy Monopoly on Selling Toys

Knowing Write from Left

Educating My Kids

My Own Lousy Education And How It May Be of Aid to the Nation

What We Can Learn from the Sixties Drug Culture

Can the Government Be Run Like a Business?

Two, Four, Six, Eight, Who Do We Appreciate . . .The Electoral College!

Is a Reasonable, Sensible, Moderate Foreign Policy Even Possible?

The Inaugural Address I’d Like To Hear the President—Whoever It May Be—Deliver

My Own Personal Fantasy League Presidential Election

A License to Drive (Me Crazy)

The Founding Fathers Have Some Words With Us

What I Like About U.(S.A.)

Acknowledgments

Pre-Preface:As We Go to Press . . .

While this book was being written in 2019, America was deep in an era of idiot populism and hooligan partisanship.

Our country was engaged in a sort of socio-political Peloponnesian War. That is, we were in the midst of a long, confusing, tedious, useless, foolish conflict that threatened to destroy democracy and left ordinary commonsensical people feeling “It’s all Greek to me.”

Then, when this book was being edited and typeset, somebody ate an undercooked bat in a Wuhan wet market.

Panic and pandemic ensued. The nation was brought to a stay-at-home standstill—whether reasonably or not no one is quite certain and by whose authority no one is quite sure. “It’s like being sixteen again,” a friend of mine said. “Gas is cheap and I’m grounded.”

Then, with everyone cooped up, going crazy and going broke, some fussbudget with a loose mutt in Central Park calls 911—“There’s an African American man threatening my life”—after being admonished by a Harvard-educated bird-watcher (who, if video is anything to go by, is the very picture of a Harvard-educated bird-watcher).

On the same day as that Central Park display of American inclusiveness and mutual respect, members of the Minneapolis police force decide to take a knee—on the neck of George Floyd. After nearly nine minutes of suffocation, Floyd died. He was accused of spending twenty dollars in the form of a banknote that had no actual value. The U.S. Senate and House of Representatives are currently spending billions of dollars in the form of banknotes that have no actual value. Would the police employ the same bigotry and violence on them?

No. All across the country the police would employ bigotry and violence on people protesting the bigotry and violence of the police.

Chaos cried out its appeal. The thievish and the vandalistic are friends of chaos, and when their friend calls they come.

The president of the United States called for peace, understanding, and unity. In a pig’s ass he did. The president waddled down to his bunker hidey-hole under the White House and urged the U.S. military to invade the country they live in. Then he talked trash and went to church (he could use it) attacking thousands of non-violent demonstrators to get there (not a very Christian way of going to church).

That’s where things stood as this book made its—socially distancing and peacefully protesting—way to the printer.

All this is to say that my book looks back on an era of troubles that, in retrospect, seem to have been the good old days.

And now I—who have covered politics and all its works and all its empty promises for half a century and who had so very many things to say about them—am left mute.

There are people possessed of the expertise necessary to explain, analyze, and make judicious commentary upon the present and future effects of the novel coronavirus. And there are, I suppose, people endowed with the foresight to determine the outcome of the social upheavals accompanying the pandemic. I’m not one of either of them.

And the last thing the world needs at the moment is more pundits who don’t know what they’re talking about.

Journalists are supposed to provide answers. But all I’ve got is questions.

Starting with, isn’t somebody supposed to be in charge?

Too many of America’s elected leaders have been acting as if the pandemic is a children’s party game where they’re all blindfolded and swinging sticks—except they’re clobbering each other instead of the virus piñata.

Under microscopic view coronavirus does look like it would make a swell papier-mâché target full of . . . lethal pathogens. Let’s leave the politicians to amuse themselves while we skip this fiesta.

Which raises another question—about this book itself. Is it now completely beside the point?

Will American politics be fundamentally changed by the pandemic? Will Americans emerge from their grievous health crisis, lock-down isolation, economic collapse, and material depravation with a newly calm, pragmatic, and reasonable attitude toward our political system? Will our reawakened awareness of systemic prejudice cause us to critically analyze and democratically restrain our civil institutions? Will we abandon the factional hysterias and histrionics of the early twenty-first century in favor of a polity based upon competence, civil discourse, and good will?

Or will we revert to our petty arguments and stupid animadversions? Having had time alone to dwell on our grievances and affronts, will we maybe even return to our spiteful quarreling with renewed vigor? This is often how human nature works.

I’m betting that human nature will triumph over adversity and challenge. And I don’t mean that in a good way.

—P. J. O’R. June 8, 2020

Preface:Manifesto For Extreme Moderation

A Voice of the Political Far-Middle

What this country needs is fewer people who know what this country needs. We’d be better off, in my opinion, without so many opinions. Especially without so many political opinions. Including my own.

Our nation faces a multitude of difficult, puzzling, complex, and abstruse problems. Most Americans aren’t sure what to do about them. But we lack politicians with the courage to say, “I’m not sure what to do about them either.” We even lack politicians with the courage to say, “I’m not sure what ‘abstruse’ means.”

Our economy has been upended by technological changes that make the industrial revolution look like James Watt putting a bigger teakettle on a hotter stove.

Our second Gilded Age, with its golden pathways across the ether, is a goldbrick when it comes to crumbling roads, decaying bridges, rackety public transit, corroding water pipes, and collapsing sewers.

A soaring economy has left absurd deprivation in the midst of ridiculous luxury. A click on a website can now deliver everything to everybody—except a living wage.

Meanwhile we’re undergoing social changes so swift and profound that they send even the best cultural anthropologist fleeing. A latter-day Margaret Mead would be hiding out in Samoa, hoping like heck to study something as relatively uncomplicated as teenagers.

The tic-tac-toe of Cold War diplomacy has given way to the foreign policy conundrums of tri-dimensional chess, like Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock played on the starship Enterprise, except the pawns have nukes.

Transformations in health care have turned the historically cheapest part of being alive—dying—into something so expensive that many people can’t afford to do it.

And surviving Americans are left trying to weigh the delicate balance between having a life worth living and having a planet that can support life.

Yet our political leaders all think they know the answer to “What Is to Be Done?,” to quote Vladimir Lenin, a political leader who—among his other faults—flunked his own quiz.

The problem with opinions is that they’re not synonymous with accomplishing anything. I have three school-age children with strong opinions about climate change but who can’t remember to close the front door in midwinter. The traditional dad line, “We’re not heating the outdoors,” hasn’t worked, so I appeal to their wokeness: “That would cause global warming!”

Then I drag the snow blower in from the garage to clear the front hall.

We need a political system that isn’t so darn sure of itself. It’s time for the rise of the extreme moderate. Power to the far-middle! Let’s bring the Wishy and the Washy back together, along with the Namby and the Pamby, and the Milque and the Toast.

The extreme moderates’ non-negotiable demand? Negotiation. We won’t compromise until we see some compromising. We want political action . . . or inaction . . . it depends.

And wouldn’t it be great if we had an opinion-free news media source? I have the perfect name for it, “Happy Medium.”

We may be on different sides of the fence, but let’s make that fence-top wider and better padded and go sit on it. Then, no matter if I’m of conservative ilk and you’re of liberal stripe, we can have a neighborly chat.

Should the government be Laissez? Should the government be Faire?

We’re all in favor of peace, but when the wolf dwells with the lamb and the leopard lies down with the kid, how often do we have to replace those sheep and goats?

Does Medicare for All mean young people have to wear trifocals and Depends and trade their bicycles for walkers?

If taxpayer money is used to pay for political campaigns, do taxpayers have ninety days to return politicians for a full refund?

Animal rights are important, but what about animal responsibilities?

Does “Pursuit of Happiness” mean I can drink before noon?

These are all important questions. Let’s discuss them while making social justice more sociable. Here, have a nip from my hip flask. We might be able to come to some accommodation with each other’s views.

If today’s political leaders would rather burn the milquetoast and ignore the wishes of the wishy-washy, extreme moderates should hang them out with the wash and they’ll be toast. Mixed-metaphorically speaking, of course, because harsh words and rash actions are not our style.

Indeed, how to go about being an extreme moderate presents some problems. The kind of things that other extremists do seem so . . . extreme. But I do have one idea. Free speech should not only be protected, it should be compulsory.

Everyone with a strong political opinion should be required to wear a sign proclaiming it.

Hang an “Immigration Is Ruining America” placard around your neck and see how you get treated by restaurant staff, Uber drivers, the people who change your hotel linen, and your immigrant grandparents.

Go see your personal physician with “I Want the Government to Run Your Doctor’s Office” lettered in Magic Marker across your abdomen. “Sorry, Senator Warren, but it looks like we’re going to have to remove your other appendix.”

Introduction:O Beautiful for . . . Pilgrim Feet?

America is in need of some explaining, especially at the moment.

That the country is a mess is the one thing the country agrees on. And even about this we differ. Half the nation seems to be saying, “We don’t know what’s wrong with America, but we can fix it,” while the other half says, “There’s nothing wrong with America, and we can fix that.”

Polar icecaps may be melting (or not!) but America’s polarization is frozen solid. And if the climate itself is a contentious issue then we cannot so much as agree on what the weather’s like outside.

Everything is much more wrong than it ever was, and we are much more right about it. We’re all mad at each other and incensed that others are furious with us. It’s a sort of permanent anti-Christmas, an obligatory holiday exchange where we’re bound to receive umbrage and compelled to give offense.

Everybody’s got a beef. Except the vegans, they’ve got a Beyond Meat. To tally our national complaints would be to empty a bathtub with a spoon. And after this long and sodden labor we’d find some new tangle of combover hairs in the political drain or ring of scum on the social porcelain that we hadn’t thought to complain about before. It is confusion.