All the Trouble in the World. - book reviews

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Oct 31, 1994 | by Michael Rust

Once upon a time, humorist P.J. O'Rourke authored an essay -- quite famous in certain circles -- with the non-Tory title, "How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink."

Times change. While O'Rourke has not become Matthew Arnold, the onetime National Lampoon editor, now Rolling Stone's foreign affairs desk chief, has evolved from a parodist into a skilled reporter who uses humor as a veneer for not insubstantial political analysis. All the world is now a stage for O'Rourke, who in All the Trouble in the World (Atlantic Monthly Press, 340 pp) explores a variety of the more publicized dangers affecting our planet.

"Let us seek out the worries but avoid the worriers," writes O'Rourke. "They are haters of liberty and loathers of individuals. They wish to politicize everything. Imagine Bill Clinton conducting your love life for you. And watch out, he may be trying to."

O'Rourke particularly is interested in how media and government have promoted a number of "fashionable worries" -- overpopulation, famine, the environment, pollution, multiculturalism, disease and poverty -- and finds that the doomsayers are aiming their anxiety in the wrong direction. In his view, journalists and politicians stir up angst about these global worries in order to offer their preferred solution -- larger and more meddle-some government.

Government, to the libertarian-leaning O'Rourke, is not worth reinventing. Politics, he writes, "is the business of getting power and privilege without possessing merit. A politician is anyone who asks individuals to surrender part of their liberty -- their power and privilege -- to State, Masses, Mankind, Planet Earth, or whatever. This state, those masses, that mankind, and the planet will then be run by ... politicians."

To bring this point home, O'Rourke supplies on-the-spot reportage from various crisis centers around the globe, ranging from the threatened Amazon rain forest to his alma mater, Ohio's Miami University, which, like virtually all American campuses, resembles the former Yugoslavia in its attitude toward matters of ethnic sensitivity. As in Parliament of Whores, his sometimes savagely funny indictment of Washington, O'Rourke cuts through the verbiage of policymakers to raise serious questions about the validity of their apocalyptic rhetoric.

O'Rourke's worldview will come as no surprise to those familiar with his work. What may surprise some is his refined craftsmanship. Most of the chapters in the book had their genesis in magazine articles, but they have survived the transformation and emerged as a coherent whole. At the same time, he tosses off the nuggets of wit O'Rourke connoisseurs have come to expect: Haiti's slave rebellion hero, Tousaint l'Ouverture "possessed that military genius which seems to come to men sometimes out of nowhere, as it did to Spartacus and Sam Nunn."

The author also demonstrates an increasing gift for the humorous travel sketch, as he shows in his description of his excursion to Bangladesh, where he finds himself in a cabinet minister's office decorated "in fake wood paneling and a jute carpet in a dogmistake shade of beige. The carpet was very damp. It's a wet country and jute is remarkably absorbent, able to blot up nearly a quarter of its weight in moisture -- nature's bath mat. The minister had half a dozen junior ministers gathered around him. They were debating some detail of family-planning policy and invited me to join the discussion. With as much international assistance as Bangladesh receives, they're used to having perfect strangers butt in on their business."

O'Rourke has become progressively less nihilistic since the days of his first political collection, Republican Party Reptile. In fact, although he chides Republicans for "getting over-excited about fetus empowerment" at their 1992 convention, he seems determined to have a belief system, and a traditional one at that, even at the risk of an occasional hectoring tone. It will be interesting if O'Rourke one day turns his talents on the Washington-based establishment of career conservatives, who have not only embraced him but also apparently supplied him with a great deal of intellectual ammunition.

All in all, O'Rourke makes a convincing case for his central thesis of All the Trouble in the World: that much of the accepted "solutions" to world problems are little more than poorly thought out excuses for political power over individuals. "The grave worries facing the world today mostly don't have solutions," he writes. "That is, they don't have solutions outside ourselves. We can't vote our troubles away, or mail them to Washington either. We can't give fifty dollars to the Sierra Club, read Douglas Couplan, and sing the Captain Planet theme song and set everything right. Instead we have to accept the undramatic and often extremely boring duties of working hard, exercising self-control, taking care of ourselves, our families, and our neighbors, being kind, and practicing as much private morality as we can stand without popping."