Great cricket, great book
WARM, languorous days … test cricket on the telly practically round the clock if you can rouse yourself to it. And a perusing of the books from the Christmas stocking. One has been a serious distraction from the cricket.
American writer PJ O'Rourke is very much a political animal. I've read much of his stuff over the years as he shifted from being a doped-up, fornication-obsessed radical protester against the Vietnam War to his present position as a libertarian conservative and member of the Republican Party. He's been hilarious all the way.
O'Rourke is not a right-winger, in fact he seems embarrassed by the neocons and the Sarah Palins of this world. He says he became a conservative the day his daughter was born and he realised he didn't want anything to change. He finds his present anchorage in the Republican Party perfectly compatible with his libertarian instincts – minimal government, freedom of expression, freedom of conscience and economic freedom.
He takes politics very seriously and is well informed. Yet he writes about it with a ribald humour – and a robust vocabulary - that destroys all pretentiousness. I'd have thought there was not much left for O'Rourke to lampoon in the American system but his latest book, Don't Vote! It Just Encourages The Bastards, is a tour de force. He seriously analyses (in his off-the-wall way) the British and French political philosophies that contributed to the American system; how it has played through into contemporary America, including the financial meltdown. He produces some marvellous passages.
· On redistribution: "Political systems are redistributive because every political system is modelled to some extent on the original political system, the family, that hotbed of communism. Within a family the dictum of Marx is valid: 'From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.' But the family is not a good model for a political system. For one thing Marxism ceases to work when it is extended outside the family by even so much as the factor of one bum brother-in-law."
· On zero-sum thinking: "Zero-sum thinking is a name for envy. Ovid, in his Metamorphoses, gives an apt description of the 'House of Envy' (as a poet in that most zero-sum of political systems, the Roman empire, might): 'Envy within, busy at the meal of snake's flesh … her tongue dripped with venom. Only the sight of suffering could bring a smile to her lips. She never knew the comfort of sleep, but … looked with dismay on men's good fortune … She could hardly refrain from weeping when she saw no cause for tears.' I didn't know Hillary Clinton's involvement in politics dated back to the reign of Augustus."
· On the right to life: "And when does life begin, legally? Right-to-life activists claim they know. But what if the soul is in the egg and we have to arrest every ovulating woman who failed to get laid?"
· On political morality: "I believe in original sin, and politics may be its name. However, unlike some of my fellow Republicans, I do not believe God is involved in politics. Observe politics in America. Observe politics around the world. Observe politics down through history. Does it look like God is involved? When it comes to being a political activist, that would be the Other Fellow."
· On decentralised government - short control loops: "The hot and cold faucets in your shower are a short control loop. If, instead of being located in the shower stall, those hot and cold faucets were in the basement, that would be a long control loop. That is not to say that a short control loop always works. You may be out of hot water. But it's better to stand in the shower fiddling with a useless faucet than to march naked and dripping through the house, amazing the children and shocking the cleaning lady, down two flights of stairs into the grungy basement and fiddle with a useless faucet there."
Great stuff! There are laughs right through. He ends up advising Barack Obama to save his presidency with a war against the Somali pirates. Yet this is a decidedly serious book.
Tailpiece
Politician: "I want fiscal reform. I want electoral reform. I want educational reform. I want …"
Voice from the back: "Chloroform!"
Last word
Hell, I never vote for anybody, I always vote against. ~WC Fields
GRAHAM LINSCOTT
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