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Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government (平装)
by P. J. O'Rourke
| Category:
Comedy, Jokes, Humor |
| Market price: ¥ 148.00
MSL price:
¥ 138.00
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MSL rating:
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| MSL Pointer Review:
Devastatingly funny and true, this book is a masterpiece from P. J. O'Rourke, hands down the single funniest polticial observer in recent memory. |
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AllReviews |
1 Total 1 pages 7 items |
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Library Journal (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-12 00:00>
Investigative humorist O'Rourke puts this vividly cynical examination of how our government works into perspective when he asks: "What the fuck do they do all day, and why does it cost so goddamned much money?" In a manner that is more likely to grab a reader by the lapels and throttle him into hysterics than your average high school civics textbook, O'Rourke deftly skewers our three branches of government. That the enigma of government can be reduced to a parliament of whores is matched only by the enigmatic author himself. Described as an intelligent conservative, he is a National Lampoon alumnus and a Rolling Stone reporter who also garners critical acclaim from the National Review . Intelligent indeed! Sure to be a hit among liberals and conservatives alike. |
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Peter Lorenzi (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-12 00:00>
This clever, biting satire brings laughs to anyone who is both optimistic and cynical about our government. O'Rourke's take on why we get the government we deserve, and what we get in return is sharply insightful and so very funny that readers can forget (at least for a moment) to be sad because the joke is on us.
His budget proposal, from his cuts on bloated agencies to his final cut, the "circumcision" one, is both hilarious and a good, hard look at the way the American federal government throws money around and, often, away.
But it's not their fault, O'Rourke wryly observes. We ask them to do this TO us in the name of doing things FOR us. Or, perhaps, do it to the other guy so they can do something for me. The best idea might simply be to take some of the money off the table and not let them have so much to spend or waste.
Conservatives will love O'Rourke's condemnations and even the most liberal will have to concede many of his points. He's like Peggy Noonan on acid and, for all we know, he just might be. O'Rourke knows how to live on the wild, not just to comment on the other side. |
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Orrin Judd (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-12 00:00>
Among the current crop of humorists, P. J. O'Rourke is one of the very best. Though it must be acknowledged that he's operating in a target rich environment, his stories of government stupidity, overreach, waste, and arrogance are truly funny. He's pretty much a libertarian, though made uncomfortable by many of the social behaviors that it would allow and overly enamored of the armed forces, so he's just as likely to light out after stupid Republican ideas as he is to castigate Democrats. Parliament of Whores finds him in the perfect position to flail both, as he follows George Bush the elder to Washington in 1989, and sets out to examine the entire U. S. government.
Unsuspecting readers may assume that O'Rourke is just going to snidely lambaste bureaucrats, politicians, institutions, and government generally, but that assumption really underestimates him. He's after much bigger game, as he reveals in the title of the book :
Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us.
The various government employees and elected officials actually come out looking pretty good. As portrayed by O'Rourke, they seem for the most part to be genuinely dedicated to their work and trying to do the best they can. It is the American people who come out of this looking pretty awful. Time and again, as he shows how useless, wasteful, and outrageously expensive the myriad government programs are, O'Rourke also makes it clear that they exist, and exist at such bloated sizes, because they have constituencies. And those constituencies are not the easily caricatured and vilified underclass, they are more often the regular work-a-day middle classes. You don't end up with a government as elephantine as ours unless those folks, we folks, in the broad middle have a huge appetite for government services.
In what I think is the best chapter in the book, "Protectors of a Blameless Citizenry," O'Rourke tracks a terrific example of this : the demand for government investigation of sudden-acceleration incidents (SAIs). If you recall the hysteria, this was the allegation that some vehicles, when you were just parked innocently in your garage, would suddenly lurch forward into a garage wall. Any objective observer could have taken one look at these SAIs and figured out that they were merely episodes where people shifted into Drive without their foot on the brake, or stepped on the gas pedal instead of the brake. But to draw such a conclusion would have meant blaming people, blaming taxpayers, blaming voters, for their own carelessness and stupidity, and that would be intolerable. Instead, it has become the particular duty of government to absolve us of blame for such manifestations of our own ineptitude, recklessness, and stupidity.
P.J. O'Rourke is a national treasure, if for no other reason than this willingness to hold us all up to well deserved ridicule. The troubling question that he raises in this book, one which Alexis de Tocqueville made in rather more measured tones in Democracy in America, is whether democracy is ultimately doomed by this very phenomenon, of the citizenry trying to avoid responsibility for their own lives. Once the people in a democracy realize that they can simply blame others for all of the problems in their lives, even those of their own making, the democracy is morally doomed. |
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A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-12 00:00>
A good handbook for any student of government... a bit bitter at times, but, hey, that's why it was written! O'Rourke's observations make up the best of his books, with All the Trouble and Holidays in Hell close by. Lest you think he's nothing but a Republican lackey, he slams George Bush, S&Ls, and GOP foreign policy as much as he does agricultural subsidies, social security, and urban blight. Those diametrically opposed to the right may fuss and boil too much to enjoy it, but moderate and libertarians will enjoy it immensly. |
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A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-12 00:00>
This book is indeed funny and occasionally insightful (the chapter on federal farm subsidies is a real eye-opener), but one shouldn't take it as a substitute for a serious analysis of the philosophical underpinnings of government. At the end of the book, O'Rourke concludes that ANY form government is morally wrong. What? That's not libertarianism, that's anarchism. Sorry PJ, but all forms of social order require some form of coercion to maintain themselves (I'm reminded of the quip, "We tried to set up an anarchic commune but nobody would follow the rules.") Conservatives who feel that O'Rourke is on "their side" should also recognize that he not only has a low opinion of his government, but of his fellow Americans as well. He's a refugee from the sixties who never lost his contempt for America, he merely redesigned it to fit the changing political winds. All in all, however, I'm glad people like him are around, lest we take ourselves too seriously. |
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Stephen McCarthty (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-12 00:00>
"It is a popular delusion that the government wastes vast amounts of money through inefficiency and sloth. Enormous effort and elaborate planning are required to waste this much money." - P. J. O'Rourke
Once upon a time, oh, about a year ago, I was on the john with my P. J. bottoms loitering around my ankles, and minding my own "business." I had one of my Uncle John's Bathroom Readers in my lap (Uncle John and the john were just made for each other) and I was reading a page that contained a lot of funny remarks related to politics. I noticed that the several excerpts that had been penned by one P. J. O'Rourke elicited the greatest laughs from me, so I determined to find out just who this P. J. was and where he'd been my whole life. After a little Ammyland surfing, I purchased his book, Parliament of Whores.
Just last week, I was on an America West flight to Northern Nevada. At the airport, after taking everything from me that one could never commandeer an airplane with, and making me remove my belt and shoes and self-respect, the powers that be somehow let me waltz onto the plane with Parliament of Whores - a very dangerous book. I mean, had I begun reading aloud, I could have convulsed the pilots, the flight crew, and the air marshal with laughter and taken control of Flight #522.
Instead, I read silently to myself, and laughed out loud every thirty seconds or so. This aroused the curiosity of the woman sitting next to me who asked what I was reading. I said, "Parliament Of Whores by P.J. O'Rourke" but somehow what she heard was, "Will you tell me your life story?" So she proceeded to tell me how she had gotten married at Lake Tahoe and bred dogs for a living. Or maybe it was that she earned her bread at Lake Tahoe and had married a dog. To be honest, I wasn't paying that much attention, but merely trying to nod and smile when I thought it was appropriate, and stealing another sentence or two from O'Rourke's book every time she paused between chapters in her oral autobiography. (She did offer me her little bag of pretzels, so at least I got something from her besides an earache.)
Parliament of Whores is P. J.'s 1991 account of a journalist's inside look at politics and how it affects American Life. And trust me, it's no laughing matter, which is exactly why we must laught at it. It's laugh or go postal, but since the postal service is tied to the federal government, it's better that we laugh. P. J. says, "I have tried to present a factual - data-filled, at any rate - account of how this government works. Which is complicated by the fact that it doesn't." But if you think a journalist should instead be writing about things that are more relevant and of greater interest to most Americans, P. J. did promise in the Acknowledgments that his next book was going to be about "Madonna's Illegitimate UFO Diet To Cure AIDS And Find Elvis."
On page 103, O'Rourke confesses that he is "a real Republican" but then adds, "unlike some current presidents of the United States I could name." That unnamed "presidents" he referred to was, of course, George H. W. Bush. Now it's his equally un-Republican son, George W. Bush who occupies The White House, proving that the apple doesn't fall far from the Bush.
But don't let the fact that P.J. is a Republican dissuade you from reading Parliament of Whores if you happen to be a Democrat because Ol' P. J. absolutely grills EVERYONE in this laugh-out-loud book. And why not? The federal government has taken it upon itself to warn the nation that undercooked eggs and meat are unhealthy. And is raw government any better for us? It too deserves a good grilling, and P.J. is just the chef to do it!
Now, I can't say that P.J. never misses the nail's head and hits his own thumb. For example, on page 78 he states that the Supreme Court opening a session with "God save the United States and this Honorable Court" is a clear violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution. This is surprisingly sloppy reporting coming from a man who makes his living with words. The First Amendment says, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." And that's what the Constitution, in its entirety, has to say about religion. So, when did the Supreme Court become Congress? And since when is stating, "God save the United States and this Honorable Court" the establishment of a law? (And has anybody informed God that He is now bound by law to do these things?)
On page 119, P.J. questions the wisdom of the illegality of recreational drugs. I think keeping these chemicals out of the hands (and arms, and lungs) of as many people as possible is indeed wise. The only exception being those funny smelling "cigarettes" which my buddy at work, The Great L.C., and I agree should be treated in like manner as alcohol, for they have, if anything, even less potential for harm: Put 10 guys into a room with loud music and bottles and bottles of booze, and it's sure that before the evening is over, one (or more) of those guys will get roughed up. But put the same 10 guys into the same room with the same loud music, and replace the booze with "wacky weed" and the only things that are gonna get roughed up are bags of potato chips.
But other than these rare disagreements, I found PALIAMENT OF WHORES to be wickedly accurate and whorribly humorous. Wait'll you read the suggestions the author makes for reducing federal expenditures (O'Rourke's Circumcision and Budget Liposuction), and the way he dissects the Special Interest Groups (The Original Barrel Of Monkeys That Nothing Is More Fun Than). This thing is simply a howl from one end to the other; the funniest book I've read in a very long time. Heck, one of the funniest books I've ever read at ANY time! It's "seriously funny" like Mark Twain. And I am no more ashamed to have Parliament of Whoresstanding in my bookcase between The Declaration Of Independence and The Heritage Guide To The Constitution than I am to have Twain's Roughing It standing between Saloons Of The Old West and I Married Wyatt Earp. Aw, well, you know what I mean.
In the final analysis - after his study of how our government works [sic] - O'Rourke concludes that what we suspected all along is true: "Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." Nevertheless, watching P. J. T. P. the U.S. is the best cry you'll ever laugh. I'll be voting P.J. for President in 2008, even though he's too smart to run... except away. |
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A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-12 00:00>
If you have ever thought to yourself, "Is Washington DC full of nothing but posturing idiots?", along comes P.J. O'Rourke to say "Well, Duh....". Armed with a factual knowledge of how DC dysfunctions and leavened with keen wit, O'Rourke takes us on a tour of the institutions of our Government, from the Congress to the the White House, through the Bureaucracies and various sinkholes of incompetence, hypocrisy, venality and just plain stupidity, and provides delicious humor while dissecting this "Confederacy of Dunces".
He also makes it abundantly clear that the fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars (or our leaders) but in ourselves. We want it all, but we don't want to pay for it.
Using the apt phrase, the arch observation, the deadly accurate thrust of wit to puncture the balloons of buffoonery he finds built into our system and the people who bungle and abuse it, he actually presents a factually serious account of what goes wrong and why it continues to go wrong. He just can't help doing so without a large dose of insightful and wicked humor. Written back in the days of Bush Senior, before 9/11, it really would be overwhelmingly depressing how little things have changed and how the DC Band Plays On no matter what, if you didn't find the horse laugh in it all.
You will never listen to a budget battle, or the justification for a farm bill, or just about any other pose or posture taken by our fearless leaders again without a smile on your face. Of course we, the public, continue to fund and support this nonsense so we have no one but ourselves to blame.
The Republic has been beset by fools, incompetents, liars, cheats, morons and pompous asses from its inception. Luckily for us, it has also always had its cynical observers, ready with the stilleto of reason and common sense to jab, torment, mock and debunk the participants in this carnival of clowns. P. J. O'Rourke takes his place in that long pantheon of wits from Henry Adams and Mark Twain, to H. L. Mencken, Will Rogers, Mort Sahl and the rest, who took great joy in pulling down Washington DC's collective pants while sounding a loud Bronx cheer. And that razzberry may be the clarion call that says, yes, we just might survive it all, one more time. |
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1 Total 1 pages 7 items |
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