Farewell, PJ O'Rourke

Silverfiddle Rant!

P.J. was, for a long time, the only cool conservative writer in America. His pieces for Rolling Stone and Harper’s and other mainstream outlets gamely featured his horrified takes on elite cluelessness and liberal-Puritan malfeasance against ordinary American playful fun. (John Podhoretz - NY Post)


I remember enjoying O'Rourke's uproariously funny and keenly observational book, Holidays in Hell. I had been to some of the danger spots he covered, and he was spot on. 

I love O'Rourke's sanguine take on why socialism's siren song attracts so many young people:

Young people are not only penniless and powerless, they’re also ignorant as hell. They think of wealth as something that’s limited, like the number of Hostess Ding Dongs on the 7-Eleven shelf. They think rich people got to the 7-Eleven first and gobbled all the Ding Dongs, leaving poor people to lick the plastic wrappers.

Young people don’t know that more Ding Dongs can be produced. They don’t know how or why more Ding Dong production is possible. And they certainly don’t know how to get the cream filling inside.

Young people believe that the way to obtain more wealth is to take it away from rich people.

You can’t do it. Well, you can do it. But you can only do it once.

You can take the Ding Dongs from the Hostess factory for free, but once you’ve eaten them you can’t go back to the Hostess factory and take more Ding Dongs for free. The Hostess factory is out of business.

He blames schools, and goes on to explain that examples from the Soviet Union are ancient history...

To millennials, hearing the USSR and Mao’s China used as examples of how socialism can go very, very wrong is like me hearing about the Kellogg-Briand Pact and the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. I did hear about the Kellogg-Briand Pact and the Smoot-Hawley Tariff in American History class. And I was not listening as hard as I could. Taking a guess, I’d say one was an international breakfast cereal treaty and the other had to do with the price of smoots.

Even Progressives are Tiring of Woke Progressives...

Remember the leftwing nutballs on the San Francisco school board who decided to rename all those schools (in the name of racial justice, or whatever) while simultaneously preventing children from entering those same schools and learning (in the name of protecting children from covid, despite the fact children are the least vulnerable group)?

The people of San Francisco gave them an embarrassing ass kicking in a recall election.  It wasn't even close.  Recall votes were 0ver 70% for all three.  The other board members are thankful that only those three could be up for recall, or probably the whole board would have been gone.

This on the tail of Virginia electing a Republican governor, Lt Governor and Attorney General, and blue states all over the US suddenly "ignoring the science" and dropping their dictatorial covid mandates.

Peak Woke?