I was sorry to hear that writer and journalist PJ O'Rourke had died.
He was 74 and according to the Daily Mail he died after "battling lung cancer".
Writing in the Telegraph, Michael Deacon argues that O'Rourke was 'the funniest conservative writer ever'.
In fact he was that rare thing – a conservative with a genuinely liberal streak.
At his best O'Rourke could be very funny. Personally I found his style a little laboured, his meticulously crafted jokes a tad convoluted.
Take this, for example:
"I endorse Hillary Clinton for president. She is the second-worst thing that could happen to America. Dorothy and Toto’s house fell on Hillary. I endorse her. Munchkins endorse her. Donald Trump is a flying monkey. Except that what the flying monkeys have to say — 'oreoreoreo' — makes more sense than Trump’s pronouncements."
The following is essentially the same joke but it's funnier and would be funnier still if the middle sentence was removed:
"I am endorsing Hillary, and all her lies and all her empty promises. It's the second-worst thing that can happen to this country, but she's way behind in second place. She's wrong about absolutely everything, but she's wrong within normal parameters."
In other words, less is more.
What made O'Rourke stand out however were not the 'one-liners' but, as Deacon points out, 'His jokes were Right-wing. This makes his work feel increasingly unusual.'
He was also 'a Republican who mocked Republicans'. For example:
"The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work,” [O'Rourke] wrote, “and then they get elected and prove it."
In Britain his nearest counterpart would probably have been the late Auberon Waugh who was a Right-wing conservative (and satirist) who mocked Conservatives as much as he did the Left.
Waugh was a smoker and, as I have noted before (Auberon Waugh and the Academy Club), a good friend of Forest.
O'Rourke was a smoker too – cigars primarily – and some years ago I tried to contact him via his publisher in the hope that he might attend or speak at one of our events.
I never managed to get in contact with him (I don't even know how often he came to the UK) so nothing came of it but the reason I made the effort was because of these and other quotes:
"The only two drugs that seem to lend a certain amount of mental organization are caffeine and nicotine."
"There is a lot of thinking that goes into writing, at least there should be. And I find that smoking is the only thing helpful. It gives me something to do when I'm staring out the window trying to sort pieces together. It's sorta like doing a jigsaw puzzle. And I find that cigars are very good for sort of contemplating the jigsaw puzzle and sorting through and finding the pieces with straight edges that go around the sides."
"The government must have something better to do with themselves! Everybody knows what tobacco does to you and to what extent it's good for you and to what extent it's bad for you. Bug off! Free people should be able to make an informed decision."
"Obviously, the government is looking for new sources of revenue. People don't want to pay any more income tax, they don't want a national sales tax, their property taxes are too high, their state sales taxes are too high. The government is looking for some place that they can raise revenue without taking a real beating in the polls. And since everybody is at least publicly opposed to cigarette smoking, the government is saying, 'Boy, can we get some more revenue here!'"
"The whole idea of freedom is to let people do what they want and take the consequences of their actions. Anytime the government tries to curtail peoples' freedoms, the weight of that argument should be very much on the government's shoulders. The government should have to defend its intervention, and it's only justified under the most grave circumstances. But to say to people that you can't smoke, or you can't drink, or you can't mow the lawn on Sundays and so on, I mean, why? You better have a very, very good reason for this, because any time you violate freedom, any time you detract from human freedom, you're moving away from everything that civilization has been moving towards since 500 BC which is greater respect for the individual, sanctity of the individual, more responsibility for the individual. And little freedoms are just as important as big freedoms. If the government can regulate your health and your safety, why shouldn't the government be regulating your finances? And, of course, in a lot of countries, that's what happens. It's not the kind of country I want."
I may not have been the greatest fan of his writing but we can ill afford to lose someone whose presence and independence of thought will be greatly missed by genuine liberals worldwide.