PJ O'Rourke - Invisible Hand vs Invisible Fist
The Republican Party Reptile speaks to Time Out Sydney about writing, smoking, the business of blood and the pleasure of leisure.
By Angus Fontaine
Our records indicate you've been to Australia before...
I was there for a while during the America's Cup in Fremantle, long enough to learn you guys can't make gin and tonic. Lime juice indeed!
And you're a year late for this speaking engagement due to, er, bum cancer...
Yeah, I'm fine now. I got a colonoscopy last week and all they found up there was my vote for George Bush.
They say a lot of men fall in love with their colonic irrigators...
Ha, not me! But whenever I go in for tests of that sort I tell them: "I'm a veteran of the 60s so don't skimp on the drugs!"
Surely, at 61, you're drug-free at the moment?
My drug of choice these days is Scotch: Dewars by preference. Although as I get older it comes with more water and less scotch.
So your famous love affair with cigars is over?
I'm not allowed them anymore. Is Nicorette gum available in Australia?
Widely available. And it doesn't come plastered in photos of dissected lungs and amputated limbs...
What a bad idea that is! How could any 16-year-old resist smoking? If I were a tobacco company, I would put a skull and cross bones on my smokes. Kids will do anything to upset adults. I mean if you have to put three rings through your tongue, a dozen through your ears and a hoop through your nut-sack to be significant in life, you must be very insignificant indeed.
Could anything be as significantly insignificant as the world's finances today?
It's been a long time since we had a good wallop like this hasn't it? Back in the early 80s there was a hell of a recession of course, but there always is. It's a cleansing.
Can any good come from all this doom and gloom?
No good will come of it, but some of the bad will go away. It's like surgery. You never want to have it and it never makes you better than you were before you got sick. I think this global financial crisis is just draining away some of the world's evil pus.
You grew up in Toledo and reckon "I never lost the sense of coming from the middle of nowhere", something many Aussies will relate to...
Yes, beyond the black stump! I mean, the outback in America is a little more heavily populated than the outback in Australia, but it is as culturally isolated. What that gives you is a constant knowledge to never get above yourself. You realise there are places other than Paris, Rome, London and New York where life's true normality exists.
So what semblance of normality exists here in Australia?
I refuse to pay any attention to Australian politics. It's bad enough knowing about American politics, let alone yours. What I do know we're all a bunch of Irish that got thrown out of the British Isles. The only difference is you were the thieves and we were the beggars. You stole your potato and ours rotted.
Will that be the subject of your John Bonython Lecture tonight?
No, if there's a theme to tonight it's that if you seek to trade freedom for security then you end up losing both. Any time we have a major economic crisis like the one we're in, people look to trade economic freedom for economic security, but it doesn't work out that way. You wind up wearing Bulgarian blue jeans.
Beyond money, what currency has served you best in life?
I had the good luck to learn an honest trade and that meant I've never had to knuckle under to any man. Writing has been my meal ticket. It's allowed me go all over God's great creation, have wonderful and terrible experiences and see things people usually don't get to see. You can't ask for much more that that.
After 12 books, a billion trenchant words of journalism and more citations in the Penguin Dictionary of Humorous Quotations than any living writer, is writing more like art, music or bricklaying?
Well I can't paint and I can't play the piano but I can make something... so bricklaying. Some days I make the Taj Mahal, other days it's garage shelves, but I can still stand back and know I built it. In truth, the process of staring at a page waiting to write is dreary and not much fun. It's the planning, the experience, the thinking it over and plotting of a story that's loads of fun.
That's on the page. What about on the web?
I'm certainly not "journaling". That's one of those wonderful modern verbs isn't it? I mean, the whole concept of people blogging while sitting around in their underwear sharing thoughts about nothing with a bunch of other people in their underwear is ludicrous. I remember when sitting around in your underwear was much more exciting.
In defence of the written word, you've said "you can't wrap fish in satellite radio and it's expensive to swat flies with a podcasting iPod". What's the future?
Working in the printed world is the only way to get the considered logic that is necessary for humour, which is all sprung logic and solipsistic fallacies. The print world is a so much more pertinent and thorough kind of writing. It's a slow process, not something you just toss off and make little sound bites out of. That's why the written word will never die. But I wonder how it must have felt when writing was invented because there was a whole huge oral storytelling tradition beforehand where guys like Homer, who couldn't read or write because he was blind, memorised the Iliad and the Odyssey and recited them from memory. Was Homer and the old guys sitting around saying, 'I never had to write it! My god, you lose the whole thing reading it on a scroll!"
Are email and SMS also ruining language and wordplay and writing?
I'm not so concerned about that. We live in a society that is less verbally adept than it was. I myself can't recall seeing either of my parents ever read a book. But being Irish, the craic, the storytelling, was extraordinary. Of course it was as stupid as it was brilliant, but that's the Irish. You can go to a little pub on the west cape of Cork and find an old drunk who talks like William fucking Yeats!
Your kids are 11, eight and five. What's story time like at the O'Rourke house?
It's a lot of fun, but there is a terrific amount of junk out there for kids too. I'll be 62 this year and when I was a kid there was no "tween literature". You went straight from Robert Louis Stevenson stuff and Kipling to grown-up stuff. The household debate right now is that my 11-year-old daughter wants to read that Twilight vampire series but it's so goddamn badly written that I forbid her from reading it on the basis of literary style!
What were your great reading epiphanies as a youngster?
The Bridge over the River Kwai was the first grown up novel I ever read, at about 12. That was a ripping good yarn. Next I discovered Exodus by Leon Uris. Then I read all the James Bond books in high school because they had the stamp of approval from the president of the Unites States, John Kennedy, who was a big Bond fan.
What early jobs taught you the value of a dollar?
It wasn't the jobs that taught me the value of a buck, it was being broke. My dad died when I was a not quite nine and we went from living quite a comfortable middle-class life to being... not hungry, but broke. It was a good lesson in life. My mum went out and got a job as a school secretary making, Christ, $3,000 a year or something. On my failed college application for financial aid my mother detailed her income and fuck - we qualified for welfare. I thought we were just broke but I had no idea we were poor.
What cheap thrills did you teach yourself?
I became a hunter, upland game mainly. I've got a bird dog and where we live in New England there's good shooting. I used to hunt ducks, but we get woodcock up here and when I get a chance there's quail and pheasant in the mid-west. I don't write about it though. That would be to mix business with pleasure.
Where's the fun in hunting?
A lot of it is to do with the work with the dogs. It's really about the dog in a way. A good hunting dog is an extraordinary. My dog Millie is a Brittany spaniel, a favoured bird dog up here in New England. When it comes to Brittanies you "buy" the nose, but the rest is in the training. Millie was home-schooled in the hunt up till high school then sent her off to dog college, as it were. Now she's six years old and in her prime.
Have you blooded your kids in the art of the hunt?
I got Elizabeth, my 11-year-old daughter, her first shotgun recently. It's a little cut down single shot, the safest possible gun around for a kid. She's shot her first bird too, but she didn't like it much. She prefers target shooting clay pigeons. Maybe it was because a friend of mine rushed over after she'd made the kill to blood her with a big bloody thumb print smudge on her forehead. Of course, she squealed like a girl.
Do you remember taking your first life, PJ?
I was so proud!
Did it help prepare you for the blood sport of journalism?
I don't think so. They're pretty separate, although there is a natural aggression involved in hunting that corresponds to an aggression I vent in humour writing. The other thing is, when I was diagnosed with cancer, they told me right from the get-go it was treatable, and the prognosis was optimistic. I thought then how fortunate I was that this wasn't the first time my life had been in peril. Many people arrive at middle age without having ever seriously feared for their life. Not me. No way.
PJ O'Rourke delivers 'Invisible Hand vs Invisible Fist', the Centre for Independent Studies' annual lecture, at Luna Park, Tue 21 Apr.
