PJ O'Rourke
Thu, 2002-08-29 12:26
#1
PJ O'Rourke
Have just finished reading 'All the toruble in the world'.
It's a humourous look at overpopulation, war, famine and all sorts of other depressing things that are happening in the world but there's also lots of sensible points.
Worryingly, considering that I'm a loony lefty and O'Rourke is an arch conservative, I found myself agreeing with a lot of what he was saying.
Has anyone else read any of his books?
jon smalldon
P J O'Rourke can be very, very good. Whenever I find myself nodding in agreement I do get a little worried. But then I think about what I'm agreeing with. Most of the time it's the descriptions of where well-meaning (or 'possibly well-meaning') politicians have managed to get everything so badly wrong.
He did write something on Northern Ireland once though which I thought showed a profound ignorance of the whole situation and I thought that maybe if he got that wrong then he might be wrong on other stuff I didn't know so much about.
But, mostly, he's good. I think All the Trouble in the World is his best collection.
justyn_thyme
I've read some short pieces of his in magazines. I also saw him interviewed on Hard Talk about 4 years ago. That was pre-Tim Sebastian. He appears in a BA television ad, though I haven't seen it for a while.
In America, liberals have no sense of humor. They believe that having a sense of humor means that you don't understand the seriousness of the situation. When I was in college you could always tell someone's general political leaning by watching them in groups from a distance. If they were glum, they were liberals. If they were laughing and telling jokes, they were conservatives. There was a lesson in that, at least for me.
As a result, in America essentially all the humorists, like O'Rourke, are either apolitical, or quite conservative.
jon smalldon
Dave Barry is very funny. Not sure he counts as a conservative though.