Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government

National Review, August 26, 1991 by Allen Randolph

Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Terry Southern, Joan Didion, Truman Capote, Hunter Thompson . . . P. J. O'Rourke? "New journalism" is a style popular among budding journalists because it allows the writer and his opinions to be part of whatever story he happens to be reporting. The danger is obvious: Will the author's sensibility become the whole subject of the report? Miss Didion, one feels, would find Hawaii arid and sinister. The worst excesses of this approach can be een in the later Hunter Thompson, a psycho-babble cynicism lacking direction or credibility which inundates the reality it claims to report. At its best (early Thompson, O'Rourke) it is sharp, bold, entertaining, and even true in that it accurately depicts the intrusion of the author into a foreign situation and his reactions to it.

In Mr. O.Rourke's earlier book Holidays in Hell, he played the part of the U.S. tourist in the Peter Arno cartoon asking a scandalized Moslem in prayer: "Eh, Mac, is this the way to Mecca?" In Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government (Atlantic Monthly Press, 233 pp., $19.95), he bursts into the Beltway with the same cheerful appallingness. The tone is set early: "The government is huge, stupid, greedy, and makes nosy, officious, and dangerous intrusions into the smallest corners of life . . ." But Mr. O'Rourke reminds us throughout that as long as we the people are munching prime pork, we had just better keep a sense of humor about things.

Mr. O'Rourke's standpoint, as the title of his first book admitted, is that of a Republican Reptile. Witness his contrasting Santa Claus and God, with the former being a Democrat and the Latter a Republican. "God," the author confides, "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 strictly accountable for their actions. . . . It is extremely difficult to get into God's heavenly club."

Santa Claus, on the other hand, is "nonthreatening. He's always cheerful. And he loves animals. He may know who has been naughty and nice, but he never does anything about it. . . . He works hard for charities, and he's famously generous to the poor. Santa Clause is preferable to God in every way but one: There is no such thing as Santa Claus."

From this unillusioned standpoint, the author gives periodic reports from two worlds: inside the Beltway, where he lived for an eternity of two years, and the real world, where he ventured to observe the consequences of government.

Take, for instance, the principle of "parity" which the U.S. Government adopted in the 1920s to ensure that farmers' goods would receive the same price in inflation-adjusted dollars as they had in 1910-1914. Sounds reasonable, even compassionate. But how does it work outside the Beltway? "If we applied the logic of parity to automobiles instead of feed and grain, a typical economy car would cost forty grand. $43,987 is what a 1910 Nash Rambler cost in 1990 dollars. And for that you got a car with 34 horsepower, no heat, no A/C, no tape deck or radio, and no windows around the front seat. If farm parity were a guiding principle of human existence we'd not only have lousy, high-priced economy cars, we'd have a total lack of civilization. When there isn't enough food, everybody has to spend all his time getting fed and nobody has a minute to invent law, architecture, or big clubs to hit cave bears over the head with. Agricultural prices have been falling, relative to the prices of other goods and services, not since the 1920s, but since the Paleolithic age. And it's a good thing. Otherwise we wouldn't grow food, we'd be food."

It would be hard to come up with sharper truths so well expressed, and in so economical a style. No congressional committee has managed even the first.

Parliament of Whores is being touted as a belly-aching good time by publicists; the very subtitle makes light of Mr. O'Rourke's efforts. Which is fine, and will probably put the book on the best-seller list. But don't expect brain candy. The author has asked too many questions and seen too much of the world to be shrugged off as a mere entertainer. The fizzing cynicism is as much a reflection of experience as a literary style.

Consider his description of a federally funded housing project: "The stairwell was a cascade of filth, a spilling of human urine and unidentifiable putrefying mater. . . . It would ave cheered me up to see anything as vibrant as a rat. . . . I've been to Beirut, where people were living in holes scooped out of rubble. I've been to the Manila city dump, where people were living in holes scooped out of garbage. And I've been to villages in El Salvador where people weren't living any more because they had been shot. I've been to rioting Soweto shantytowns and besieged Gaza Strip refugee camps, and half-starved Contra outposts in the jungles of Honduras, and I've never been to a place I would less rather live than this housing project in New Jersey."