Republican Party reptile

National Review, June 5, 1987 by Bob Mack

Republican Party Reptile

by P. J.O'Rourke (Atlantic Monthly, 220 pp., $6.95)

P. J. O'ROURKE is a conservative forthe future. As a former editor of National Lampoon and a frequent contributor to all the trendy glossies, he is a part of and yet apart from the East Coast Media Establishment. O'Rourke is funny, cool, hip, and sexy. He's everything Tom Shales says conservatives are not. And he is skillful enough to smuggle his cockamamie conservatism into any magazine he wants. (By the way, he's not a well-connected Harvard grad, but a Midwesterner who infiltrated the Lampoon hierarchy and went on from there.)

O'Rourke is infuriating, but also disarming.Who can suppress a snicker when confronted with the belligerent brand of social dissection that characterizes his new collection of 21 essays, Republican Party Reptile?

We are the Republican Party Reptiles. . . I think our agenda is clear. We are opposed to: government spending, Kennedy kids, seatbelt laws . . . busing our kids anywhere other than Yale, trailer courts near our vacation homes, Gary Hart, all tiny Third World countries that don't have banking secrecy laws, aerobics, the UN, taxation without tax loopholes, and jewelry on men . . .

There are thousands of people in Americawho feel this way, especially after three or four drinks. If all of us could unite and work together, we could give this country . . . well, a real big hangover.

There's an element of danger inO'Rourke. For one thing, he flaunts a Dionysian disposition that is largely charming but still a potential turnoff to traditional conservatives--as well as an easy stick for envious liberals to thwack him with. The former publisher of Lampoon told NR that O'Rourke is a "flaming a--,' while an exeditor added, "The last time I saw P.J., I threw a drink in his face.'

Left-wingers understandably see himas a pragmatic traitor who cashed in on the Reagan Revolution. But it's not as if O'Rourke can be sure of help from the Right. Many serious conservatives consider him a trendy lightweight, forgetting that he has reported from Beirut, Russia, Poland, El Salvador, and the Philippines (during Marcos's final days).

They also fail to notice that beneatha flippant surface and a frequently vulgar brand of humor, O'Rourke is remarkably concerned with mores and morals. For example, his earlier book, Modern Manners, was a farcical slap at what passes for etiquette in our bankrupt culture. But it was also a subtle declaration of disgust with today's self-righteous depravity. O'Rourke cleverly--and correctly--linked the disappearance of manners to the general decline of Western civilization.

In turn, the best essay in RepublicanParty Reptile is entitled "Ferrari Refutes the Decline of the West.' And even in apparent bits of froth like "Horrible Protestant Hats,' O'Rourke slips in an eyebrow-raising insight:

Until the last years of the Eisenhowerera, WASPs wore wonderful haberdashery . . . Then something happened . . . Maybe it's no accident that the rise of the silly hat coincides with the disappearance of a coherent American foreign policy, the decay of business ethics, the increase in functional illiteracy, and the general decline of the United States as a world power. The head is symbolic of reason, discipline, good sense, and self-mastery. Putting a fuzzy green Tyrolean hat decorated with a tuft of deer behind on top of it means trouble.

O'Rourke himself always wears a suitand tie, is often mistaken for a CIA agent while traveling, and has this advice for youngsters (from his "Alphabet for Schoolboys'):

N is for Nike. It's a missile, nota shoe.

Get yourself an oxford in cordovan,not blue.

Conservatism needs P. J. O'Rourke.His audacity brings to mind the image of a vintage Jude Wanniski showing up for his first day at the Wall Street Journal behind the wheel of a convertible, in a gold lame suit, with a Las Vegas showgirl on his arm. Christopher Buckley says that P.J. equals S.J. (Perelman) on LSD. But I see him more as Hunter Thompson minus the idiocies, or as Tom Wolfe with his white suit soiled and shredded after a catfight with Ayn Rand. Whatever else he is, O'Rourke is a party animal whose "be square or beware' attitude could teach timid conservatives to take a bogus accusation and cram it back down the accuser's throat--with a whisky chaser.

When it comes to political philosophy,however, O'Rourke, like many Republicans, unfortunately thinks "neither conservatives nor humorists believe man is good. But left-wingers do.' This view mistakenly sets up Hobbes as the paradigmatic conservative antidote to the liberal god, Rousseau. Liberals are allegedly optimistic because they believe people are "perfectible' and can someday be molded into a kind of egalitarian Gumby. Conservatives are thus supposed to be pessimistic because they realize men are inherently evil and unequal, and that capitalism isn't perfect--it's just the best we can hope for.

Thomas Sowell sets up the samefalse alternative of "unconstrained' liberal versus "constrained' conservative in his latest book, A Conflict of Visions. Other apologists, like George Gilder, have felt compelled to defend capitalism by the ethical standard of compassion rather than by the political standard of competition.