The Funny Stuff E-Book

P. J. O'Rourke

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

Seitenzahl: 258

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

'P. J. O'Rourke was the funniest writer of his generation, one of the smartest and one of the most prolific. Now that he belongs to the ages, P.J. takes his rightful place along with Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain and Dorothy Parker in the Pantheon of Quote Gods.' Christopher Buckley from his introduction When The Penguin Dictionary of Modern Humorous Quotations was published in 1994, P. J. O'Rourke had more entries than any living writer. And he kept writing funny stuff for another 28 years. Now, for the first time, the best material is collected in one volume. Edited by his longtime friend Terry McDonell, The Funny Stuff is arranged in six sections, organized by subject in alphabetical order from Agriculture to Xenophobia. Not only did P.J. write memorable one-liners, he also meticulously constructed riffs that built to a crescendo of hilarity and outrage - and are still being quoted years later. His prose has the electric verbal energy of Tom Wolfe or Hunter S. Thompson, but P.J. is more flat-out funny. And through it all comes his clear-eyed take on politics, economics, human nature - and fun. The Funny Stuff is a book for P.J. fans to devour but also a book that will bring new readers and stand as testament to one of the truly original American writers of the last 50 years.

Leseprobe

Also by P. J. O’Rourke

Modern Manners

The Bachelor Home Companion

Republican Party Reptile

Holidays in Hell

Parliament of Whores

Give War a Chance

All the Trouble in the World

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

The Enemies List

Eat the Rich

The CEO of the Sofa

Peace Kills

On The Wealth of Nations

Driving Like Crazy

Don’t Vote—It Just Encourages the Bastards

Holidays in Heck

The Baby Boom

Thrown Under the Omnibus

How the Hell Did This Happen?

None of My Business

A Cry from the Far Middle

First published in the United States of America in 2022 by Grove Atlantic

First published in Great Britain in 2022 by Grove Press UK, an imprint of Grove Atlantic

Copyright © 2022 by P.J. O’Rourke

Introduction copyright © 2022 by Christopher Buckley

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.

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

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

Grove Press UK

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

Hardback ISBN 978 1 80471 003 6

Export paperback ISBN 978 1 83895 874 9

Ebook ISBN 978 1 80471 004 3

Printed in Great Britain

For

Christina Mallon O’Rourke

Elizabeth Helena O’Rourke

Olivia Christine O’Rourke

Edward Clifford Kelly O’Rourke

CONTENTS

Introduction

Editor’s Note

Part I - America and Americans

Part II - Good Clean Fun

Part III - Around the World

Part IV - Real Life

Part V - Media and Messages

Part VI - My Generation (Baby Boomers)

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY

P. J. O’Rourke was the funniest American writer of his generation, as well as one of the smartest and most prolific. In the lonely months since he died, I’ve been asking myself: What made him so darn quotable? When some years ago Penguin published The Dictionary of Modern Humorous Quotations, he had more entries in it than any other living writer.

Now he has an entire book of quotations all to himself, edited by longtime friend Terry McDonell. Normally, I’d say what a “painstaking” job Terry did in creating this “monumental work,” but all he had to do was pluck one low-hanging fruit after another. In fact, he probably rented a combine harvester from the literary division of John Deere. The hardest part must have been deciding what not to include. Now that he belongs to the ages, P. J. O’Rourke takes his rightful place along with Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, and Dorothy Parker in the Pantheon of Quote Gods.

I never read or listened to P.J. without thinking, “Wish I’d said that.” In an article for the New York Times after his death, I called him “hyperaphoristic.” This annoyed many readers because they had to look it up. Whatever you call someone who dispenses aphorisms, bon mots, maxims, axioms, epigrams, and apothegms, P.J. was a conveyor belt of verbal pearls. I can hear him saying, “‘Conveyor belt of verbal pearls?’ Mixed metaphor alert!” Okay. Conveyor belt of apothegms. Happy now?

Some people are born witty, others achieve wit, and others have wit thrust upon them. Did Patrick Jake O’Rourke spring from his mother’s womb and say to the physician who delivered him, “Doctor Livingstone, I presume?” Or “Get me out of this wet placenta and into a dry martini”?

His Buick-salesman father died when P.J. was nine. O’Rourke père used to take his son with him to bars. I see O’Rourke fils—French for “squirt”—sitting there, listening to the grown-up repartee and jokes. We don’t get many eight-year-olds in here. No, and at these prices, you aren’t likely to.

He was a proud son of Toledo, Ohio. This pedigree made him 100 percent red, white, and blue Americano. Ohio is famous for providing us with presidents, but it has also given us P.J., James Thurber, Donald Ogden Stewart, Erma Bombeck, Dave Chappelle, and Ambrose Bierce (also, Madalyn Murray O’Hair, who was funny in her own way). Could it be something in the water? Ohio water was famous at one point for actually being flammable. P.J. was determined to write the definitive history of Toledo “from the beginning of time to the end of the universe.” He never did. The loss to history is immeasurable, but his Toledoness remained a quintessential part of him.

He went to Miami University, Ohio, which, as he pointed out, was not the University of Miami, where you could major in water skiing. He left the American heartland for the American littoral—specifically, Baltimore, where he got a master’s degree in English lit at Johns Hopkins.

It struck me just now as I typed “Baltimore” that the city was the lifelong home of H. L. Mencken. P.J. probably had to read Joyce’s Ulysses to get that master’s degree. One of the key words in that cinder block of literature is “metempsychosis.” You remember metempsychosis. Oh, right, you had to look up “hyperaphoristic.” It means the transmigration of a soul from one person into another. What I’m driving at in my pedantic and precious way is that P. J. O’Rourke was the H. L. Mencken of his day.

His first job in journalism was at a lefty underground rag called Harry. It folded after a mob occupied its offices to protest Harry’s insufficient Leninism. He migrated up the Acela corridor avant la lettre (look it up) to New York and a job at National Lampoon magazine. Toledo Kid meets Harvard Smart-Asses. Result: serious funniness.

In memory yet green is the moment the National Lampoon 1964 High School Yearbook Parody hit the newsstands. If you’re an aging boomer like me who now pays attention to the continence-aids ads on the evening news, you remember that moment too. The yearbook was a game changer. A weather changer. An underwear changer, because you laughed so hard you had to change, even though you weren’t incontinent then.

Masquerading as the yearbook of C. Estes Kefauver Memorial High School in Dacron, Ohio, this encyclopedic work of comic genius was largely a collaboration between Doug Kenney, a Lampoon cofounder, and its rising star staffer, P. J. O’Rourke. It has sold over two million copies. Kenney took the school motif to the next level by cowriting the script for Animal House.

So here’s my big, never-until-now-revealed, groundbreaking theory—namely, that P.J.’s apprenticeship at the Lampoon was the launchpad of his hyperapho . . . his Quote-Dynamo. I’m prepared to go out on a limb no man has gone out on before and posit that it was at the Lampoon that P. J. O’Rourke found his voice. It was the strop on which he stropped the razor of his . . .

He left us twenty-one books, among them Parliament of Whores (about Washington, natch), Eat the Rich, Give War aChance, Peace Kills, How the Hell Did This Happen? (about the 2016 election, natch), and Don’t Vote—It Just Encourages the Bastards. His final one was A Cry from the Far Middle.

The last time I was with him, he said, “I’m tired. I’ve been doing this for over half a @#$%ing century.” He did not actually say “ampersandhashtagdollarsignpercent.” He used a shorter word. He may have been tired—who wouldn’t be after half a fucking century?—but it didn’t show on the page. The Toledo Kid pitched fastballs up to the bottom of the ninth.

Those twenty-one books, sometimes misfiled in the “Humor” ghetto in bookstores, include a dissertation on Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. P.J. wasn’t in it only for the funny. He was a Serious Man—his forebear Mencken would have said “an ernst Mann”—who didn’t take himself seriously. Self-seriousness is a serious impediment to wit. It’s not that he lacked ego. “Egoless writer” is a very funny oxymoron. He wore his credentials lightly because he saw himself as just another player in the Human Comedy.

Terry has done a great job of combine harvesting the O’Rourkean oeuvre—oo-ver, as P.J. would pronounce it. It must have been a fun labor of love. Reading P. J. O’Rourke is like spooning up caviar with a ladle. And being his friend for forty years was even better than driving fast on drugs while getting your wing-wang squeezed and not spilling a drop.

Wish I’d said that.

EDITOR’S NOTE

EDITING P.J. TERRY MCDONELL

Chris Buckley points out in his slyly quotable introduction that P. J. O’Rourke was the most quoted man on the planet and goes on to suggest that as the editor of this compendium I needed only to pluck one low-hanging fruit after another. Well, fair enough.

Two days after P.J. passed, Matt Labash, who got to know P.J. in Kuwait during the 2003 Iraq War, wrote in his Slack Tide newsletter that P.J. was such a good writer that he left “at least one chocolate on the pillow in every paragraph he wrote” and then proved it by randomly opening five of P.J.’s books and calling out the first passage he saw in each (all included in this volume). That’s how good P.J. was—incapable of writing a flat paragraph.

The only editorial solution was to break the “only-oneliners” rule and select paragraphs as well, which means you can read this volume more or less in line with Labash’s proof of P.J. as a Great Writer. Make that GREAT WRITER!—the kind of amplification P.J. would never use.

*    *   *

In 1970 P.J. lived in a triangle-shaped apartment above the Midtown Tunnel in Manhattan. The living room came to a point like the bow of a ship heading uptown on First Avenue. Other writers knew P.J. as the National Lampoon editor who had put a dog on the cover with a pistol in his ear and the headline: “If You Don’t Buy This Magazine, We’ll Kill This Dog.” I’m not sure why, but that coverline and that pointed apartment seemed to match.

He told me that whenever he had a little money in the bank, he applied for higher credit lines and that I should too.

“It’s not like we’ve got a secure future,” he said. He had just gone freelance.

“Time to grow up,” he said. “We’re screwed.”

Well, P.J. wasn’t screwed because it was clear that he was going to figure out something smart for himself—maybe even as a writer. I wondered how high he had pushed his credit lines.

Many of his Lampoon colleagues were stepping easily into the movie business, starting with Animal House (1978). P.J. took his shot with a Rodney Dangerfield vehicle called Easy Money and used the payday as a down payment on a small house in New Hampshire and a Porsche. The problem was that he hated the work as much as he loved the 911 Turbo.

“It’s just a stupid movie,” P.J. said, as we were driving from New Hampshire to Boston. He was going to drop me off at the airport and then spend the day working with Rodney on the script.

“Come on . . .,” I said. Like everyone I knew in journalism, I was envious of movie money.

“I should know how bad it is,” he said. “I’m writing it . . .”

Unlike Rodney, what was funny to P.J. was never loud or slapstick or absurd, and he loved language, which made editing him joyous—not a word often associated with the editorial process. He might occasionally drop an ironic straight line about deadlines being his friends, but he always met them on exact word count with clean copy. He was a tight grammarian, by which I mean his grammar was immaculate. The structural rules governing composition reflected his love of logic. He could talk about morphology (“the study of the forms of things”), a word he taught me. Copy editors loved him until they realized he was better at their jobs than they were.

Our first piece together was “Cocaine Etiquette,” at Rolling Stone. P.J. wrote: “Cocaine and etiquette are inseparable, they go together like cocaine and, well, more cocaine.” We were working from the inside out. Sometimes all we did was laugh, although actually laughing is something P.J. never did. I had just edited this:

Q. What should be served with cocaine?

A. Most people enjoy a couple thousand cigarettes with their “face Drano.” Others mix “indoor Aspen Lift lines” with multiple sedatives that achieve that marvelous feeling so similar to not having taken drugs at all. But everyone, whether he wants to or not, should drink plenty of whiskey or gin. If you smell strongly of alcohol, people may think you are drunk instead of stupid.

The explosiveness came with the pop at the end—an obvious (logical) truth underlining the point he was making. It worked with his funny stuff and, more powerfully, when his irony turned hard. I’ll point to a piece I did not edit—P.J. on Somalia:

Before the marines came, the children were dying like . . . “Dying like flies” is not a simile you’d use in Somalia. The flies wax prosperous and lead full lives. Before the marines came, the children were dying like children.

That Somalia piece, “All Guns, No Butter,” was for Rolling Stone after P.J. went on contract and was listed on the masthead as “The Foreign Affairs Desk.” What he mostly did in that job was travel the world from war zone to war zone, filling his notebooks with concise if sometimes wrenching reporting that he ran through an IBM Selectric back home in New Hampshire or Washington, DC, where he had taken an apartment to be close to what was becoming his default target, Big Government. His first book about politics was Parliament of Whores, and you could see he was building on what he called his “Pants-Down Republican” conceit. “Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys. . . .”

Beyond his one-liners, P.J.’s basic construct was to take familiar concepts like, say, God and Santa Claus, push them to their logical extreme with a coating of his seemingly good-natured biases, and end with a hilarious (and logical) kicker, as shown in this quote from his 1991 Parliament of Whores:

I have only one firm belief about the American political system, and that is this: God is a Republican and Santa Claus is a Democrat.

God is an elderly or, at any rate, middle-aged male, a stern fellow, patriarchal rather than paternal and a great believer in rules and regulations. He holds men accountable for their actions. He has little apparent concern for the material well-being of the disadvantaged. He is politically connected, socially powerful and holds the mortgage on literally everything in the world. God is difficult. God is unsentimental. It is very hard to get into God’s heavenly country club.

Santa Claus is another matter. He’s cute. He’s nonthreatening. He’s always cheerful. And he loves animals. He may know who’s been naughty and who’s been nice, but he never does anything about it. He gives everyone everything they want without the thought of a quid pro quo. He works hard for charities, and he’s famously generous to the poor. Santa Claus is preferable to God in every way but one: There is no such thing as Santa Claus.*

When he branched out from Rolling Stone, it was to the Atlantic Monthly, the American Spectator, the Weekly Standard, and the Cato Institute. You could see his interests shifting toward policy. The bestsellers had started when P.J. walked away from Easy Money and they kept coming. P.J. quotes got passed around like, well, P.J. quotes. For a while (before the internet), I kept a file of them, including some long paragraphs. I used short ones to spice my letters and sent long ones to writers as unsubtle suggestions to take some chances. I have included many of them here, and I have probably angered the Quotation Gods by also occasionally quoting myself above without attribution—something P.J. never did. Finally, in the interest of space, context, and clarity, I occasionally cherry-picked and/or shortened passages—something that is always dangerous to do with a great writer. But then, as P.J. liked to put it, safety has no place anywhere.

Some editing to P.J.’s riffs and quotes was done for clarity, continuity, and humor.

* P. J. O’Rourke, Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U. S. Government, 1991.

PART I

AMERICA AND AMERICANS

Consider someone who had never been to America. What would he or she think, after being Blockbustered, Safewayed, Chevroned, Shelled, Dodged, Nissaned, Wal-Marted, Dress Barned, Gapped, Levied, Burger Kinged, Dairy Queened, and Taco Belled? Would he have a good impression of the United States? No. Would he have an accurate impression? That’s another matter.

—The CEO of the Sofa (2001)

We don’t need a wall on our border; we need gates with turnstiles and ticket-takers. The right way to limit immigration (and make people in foreign countries pay for it) is to charge admission to the United States. Disneyland costs $100 a day. There are at least 12 million illegal immigrants in America. By my calculation, we’re leaving $438 billion a year on the table.

—How the Hell Did This Happen? (2017)

AMERICA

America is the only nation in the world based on happiness. Read the Magna Charta, the Communist Manifesto, the Ten Commandments, the Analects of Confucius, Plato’s Republic, the New Testament or the UN Charter, and find me any happiness at all. America is the Happy Kingdom.

—Parliament of Whores (1991)

The fat and stupid are a vital part of America.

—The CEO of the Sofa (2001)

AMERICANS

Americans are remarkably puritanical—when they aren’t high as kites.

—The CEO of the Sofa (2001)

We Americans are an unprincipled nation. Not that we’re bad or anything. It’s just that it’s hard for us to pay attention to abstract matters when we have so many concrete matters—cellular phones, ski boats, salad shooters, trail bikes, Stair-Masters, snowboards, pasta-making machines—to occupy us.

—Parliament of Whores (1991)

We’ve become a nation of immense nine-year-olds dressed for all occasions in T-shirts, shorts, and Tevas. Or, sometimes, just to change things up, pajama pants, sports bras, and wife-beater shirts.

—None of My Business (2018)

There are always groups of people upon whom to blame things. But there’s no group of people upon whom to blame everything, except in a free and democratic society where we can, with confidence, blame everything on ourselves.

—Don’t Vote—It Just Encourages the Bastards (2010)

ANGER

Maybe the answer to America’s current state of angry perplexity is “Everybody must get stoned.” It’s certainly an idea that’s trending. But I was around the last time we tried that. And perhaps this is an historical period that we should re-examine.

—The CEO of the Sofa (2001)

ANIMAL RIGHTS

With all due respect to advocates for animal rights, what about animal responsibilities?

—A Cry from the Far Middle (2020)

BAILOUTS

We have the cow of economic freedom. Do we take the cow to market and trade her for the magic beans of bailout and stimulus? When we climb that beanstalk we’re going to find a giant government at the top. Are we going to be as lucky as Jack the giant killer was? I’m not sure Jack himself was that lucky with his giant killing. My guess is that Jack spent years being investigated by giant subcommittees and now Jack’s paying a giant tax on his beanstalk bonus.

—Don’t Vote—It Just Encourages the Bastards (2010)

BANKS

Kill the spending. Fuck the regulations. Marry an investment banker.

—Don’t Vote—It Just Encourages the Bastards (2010)

At a subconscious level we all have an image of banks as being like Scrooge McDuck’s money vault. We put our money in banks, and bankers put that money—all those ones and fives and dimes and quarters—into a great big safe, where they rub it and dust it and stack it in piles, and where sometimes, late at night, the bankers take off all their clothes and roll in the stuff and yell, “Whee!”

—None of My Business (2018)

What I want is a compact household-size type of Central Bank for my own personal use. A small, handy “Central Bank of O’Rourke” that would fit in the laundry room or in the mudroom between the dog kennels.

—None of My Business (2018)

BIG GOVERNMENT

Great, hulking, greasy, obese, gobbling, omnivorous, everaggrandizing, fat-witted government—I am not its friend. In Washington, the Republicans are (in their wing-tip-hobbled, suspender-entangled, Old Spice−befogged way) trying to destroy big government. The Republicans I like okay. The destruction I adore.

—Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut (1995)

BOARDING SCHOOLS

Rich children are shipped to boarding schools, often before they are weaned. A child who was kept in the Bronx Zoo for twelve years would acquire more courtesy and taste.

—Modern Manners (1983)

Occasionally boarding schools do turn out someone along the lines of the “preppy” stereotype. But in real life their graduates are more likely to wind up playing electronic xylophone, and singing fifties toothpaste commercials in a performance art ensemble.

—Modern Manners (1983)

THE BUSH FAMILY

Our families are big. The Bush family, for example, is so big that one presidency wasn’t enough for them, let alone one SUV.

—Driving Like Crazy (2009)

Jeb should not have heeded the playground taunt, “Your mother dresses you funny,” and gone home and let Barbara pick out his clothes. It worked for his brother and dad.

—How the Hell Did This Happen? (2017)

BUSINESS

You might think big business would be hard to define in this day of leveraged finances and interlocking technologies. Not so. Big business is every kind of business except the kind from which the person who’s complaining about big business draws his pay.

—Parliament of Whores (1991)

When you looked at the Republicans you saw the scum off the top of business. When you looked at the Democrats you saw the scum off the top of politics. Personally, I prefer business.

—Parliament of Whores (1991)

BUSINESS INVESTMENT

Business investment defines civilization. Barbarians don’t raise money through debt and equity. They raise money through stealing. (Although, during the boom in subprime mortgage lending it was sometimes difficult to tell the difference.)

—Don’t Vote—It Just Encourages the Bastards (2010)

BUSINESSMEN

We have Jeff Bezos in a New Kids on the Block bomber jacket, Bill Gates outfitted in Mr. Rogers’s sweaters and Gloria Steinem’s old aviators and cutting his own hair, Elon Musk smoking pot on TV, and Richard Branson looking like the guy at the end of the bar muttering lines from The Big Lebowski.

—A Cry from the Far Middle (2020)

CALIFORNIA

There are branches of my family too loony even for jobs in government. Now imagine that my family occupies hundreds of thousands of square miles and is made up of tens of millions of people too loony even for jobs in government. It’s California.

—Don’t Vote—It Just Encourages the Bastards (2010)

California cuisine in perfection: My chicken had not only been allowed to range free, it had been given aromatherapy and stress counseling.

—Eat the Rich (1998)

CHICKEN LITTLE

You can almost hear Chicken Little’s New Hampshire primary speech. “My feathered friends, our coops are guarded by foxes! All our eggs are in one basket! We’re living on chicken feed! Massive layoffs are threatened at KFC! Plus, the sky is falling! In these troubled times, who better to lead us in squawking and fluttering and running around after our heads have been cut off than the Honorable C. Little—a real chicken!”

—Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut (1995)

CHICKEN LITTLE’S AGENDA

Was Chicken Little running around telling all the other chickens that the sky was falling out of pure, disinterested altruism? Or was there something Chicken Little wanted? And once Chicken Little had all the other chickens convinced that the sky was falling was there, all of a sudden, a Federal Department of Falling Sky? And did Chicken Little get appointed Secretary of Things That Hit You on the Head?

—Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut (1995)

CIVIL RIGHTS

We applaud the outcome of the Civil War and the civil rights movement, but an alternative—less costly in blood and treasure—was to not treat Black people like shit for five hundred years.

—Don’t Vote—It Just Encourages the Bastards (2010)

CIVIL WAR

Of course these internal political contretemps can get out of hand. The Civil War comes to mind. However, as heated as America’s arguments may be at the moment, this is not 1861. Ft. Sumter is not taking any incoming. Our political battles are all smoke and no lethal fire. (Except from a few fringe lunatics, of course. But we’ve always had those.)

—A Cry from the Far Middle (2020)

THE CLINTONS

“Mind your own business and keep your hands to yourself.” These may be rightly called the Bill and Hillary Clinton Rules. Hillary, mind your own business. Bill, keep your hands to yourself.

—Don’t Vote—It Just Encourages the Bastards (2010)

That fat kid who played saxophone in the school band and told on us when we were smoking in the boys’ room—him and his wife, the Iron Dingbat, don’t even drive a car. They ride around in the back of long, black tax tractors fogging the windows with damp exhalations about reinventing government.

—Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut (1995)

Bill Clinton was an ancient monument of liberalism. If Washington were Pharaonic Egypt—and sometimes it is—Hillary would be the Sphinx. With the exception that she never shuts up. And she’s hardly immobile. For the past quarter of a century she’s been everywhere we looked.

—How the Hell Did This Happen? (2017)

THE CLINTONS (ADMINISTRATION)

Bill Clinton was able to harness warmongering’s increase in political power and prestige without losing the support of smug lefty pacifists. He was Franklin Delano Gandhi.

—The CEO of the Sofa (2001)

The Clinton administration is going to decrease government spending by increasing the amount of money we give to the government to spend.

—Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut (1995)

Mrs. Clinton is oblivious to the idea that the government programs she advocates may have caused the problems the government programs she advocates are supposed to solve.

—The CEO of the Sofa (2001)

THE CLINTONS (LITTLE ROCK)

Little Rock by day isn’t much fun for anyone. There’s nobody on the downtown streets. The city has that dead look of places where people make their money behind closed doors. Every third building seems to be a lawyer’s office. The Rose Law Firm occupies a whole block. Its windows are dark. The curtains don’t move. It’s a sinister place in a friendly, red brick colonial way, as though the Continental Congress had a Ministry of Fear.

—Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut (1995)

THE CLINTONS (SEX LIVES)

A lot of people say that Hillary’s healthcare reform plan almost destroyed Bill Clinton’s first term. It certainly diminished Hillary’s influence in the White House. Bill had to seek help from a different woman to almost destroy his second term.

—Don’t Vote—It Just Encourages the Bastards (2010)

COMMITTEES

Given the complete dominance of politics by Committee Brain, the wonder is that anything gets done, and the horror is that it does. What government accomplishes is what you’d expect from a committee. “A camel is a horse designed by a committee” is a saying that couldn’t be more wrong. A camel is a seeing-eye dog designed by a committee and available free with government grants to the halt and the lame.

—Don’t Vote—It Just Encourages the Bastards (2010)

COMMUNISTS

The redskis have infiltrated the all-important exercise-video industry, not to mention movies and TV. Academia, too, is a veritable compost heap of Bolshie brainmulch. Beardo the Weirdo may have been laughed out of real life during the 1970s but he found a home in our nation’s colleges, where he whiles away the wait for the next Woodstock Nation by pestering undergraduates with collectivist twaddle when they should be thinking about better car stereos.

—The Enemies List (1996)

Communism appealed to the kind of progressive intellectuals who liked to read dinosaur-turd sonnets while sitting on Bauhaus ass-crampers inside Le Corbusier terrariums lit by yard-sale lamps.

—The CEO of the Sofa (2001)

Enormous differences in income, wealth, and power push people toward communism. And maybe so, but the only people it pushed toward communism in America were sixties college students who already had income, wealth, and power—or at least their fathers did.

—Eat the Rich (1998)

For young people today, the only communist societies they know anything about are that goofy outlier North Korea and Cuba where the Marxist-Leninism comes with cheap rum, ’57 Chevys, and “Guantanamera” sing-alongs.

—A Cry from the Far Middle (2020)

Communists are now just another small, half-baked cult who put out an occasional newsletter (the Washington Post, for instance) and pester people in airports (particularly Peking’s).

—The Enemies List (1996)

CONGRESS

When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.

—Parliament of Whores (1991)

CONSERVATION

When we gather in a big public crowd, we want the political system to do something. If we wanted to do something ourselves, we’d be at work. If we wanted to learn something, we’d be at school. And if we were really interested in natural resource conservation, we’d conserve some resources by staying home.

—The CEO of the Sofa (2001)

CONSERVATIVES

Conservatives can be buttheads, too. There are the reborn Jesus creeps, for instance. We should do to these what the conservative Romans did, with lions. But even regular country club–type Republicans can be stuffy about some things—dope smuggling, for example, and mixing Quaaludes in your scotch, and putting your stereo speakers on the roof of your house and turning the volume all the way up and playing Parliament of Funk at 3:00 a.m.

—Republican Party Reptile (1987)

CONSPIRACY THEORIES

The presidential “Birther,” the 9/11 “Truther,” the JFK assassination “Grassy Knoller,” and every other conspiracy buff is announcing aloud: “The world is so stupid that even I can understand it.”

—Don’t Vote—It Just Encourages the Bastards (2010)