BOOKS

Then America mocks itself

Colin Welch

PARLIAMENT OF WHORES by P. J. O'Rourke Picador, £14.99, pp. 233 arty-four-year-old Mr O'Rourke appears to advantage on his cover, well brushed hair, buttoned-down oatmeal shirt, dark suit, emerald green tie, alluding to Irish ancestry, which, together with Jewish ancestry, has contributed so disproportion- ately to America's wit and wisdom. His conventional appearance does justice to the extreme normality and conservatism of his views, though hardly to the extravagant reasoning, bizarre imagery and picaresque playfulness with which they are deployed and driven to extremes, or almost.

His features are embellished by a pleasant but ironic smile, the second dim- ple suggesting its frequent use. A horse laugh, uncontrollable, incapacitating, near to joyous tears, might have suited him even better. Mr O'Rourke is surely a tremen- dous laugher. He quotes Horace: 'what stops a man who can laugh from telling the truth?' — not the only evidence of a good education, achieved perhaps just before the doors of the American mind slammed shut. He laughs, speaks the truth and laughs again. He finds belly-laughs in the running brooks, snickers in stones. He laughs at everything, including what conventional tastes forbid.

His cover proclaims him 'a lone humorist' (dire word, as Wallace Arnold would have said, wisely eschewed by de Tocqueville), attempting here to 'explain the entire US government'. Chapter- headings set the tone. 'Why God is a Republican and Santa Claus ig a Democrat' — God being an elderly male, stern, hold- ing men strictly accountable for their actions, a great believer in rules and regu- lations, difficult, unsentimental, with little apparent concern for the material well- being of the disadvantaged; Santa Claus being, by contrast, cute, non-threatening, cheerful, giving everyone what he wants without thought of quid pro quo, preferable to God in every way but one — he doesn't exist.

More headings: 'The Dictatorship of Boredom' — which ensures that the last politician left awake gets to spend all the tax money. 'On the Blandwagon' — a hilarious description of political conventions. 'The Three Branches of Government: Money, Television and Bull- shit'. 'Our Goverment: What the Fuck Do They Do All Day and Why does it Cost so Goddamned Much Money?' Mr O'Rourke, incidentally, notes how 25 years of tipness' in America has taught ordinary middle- class parents a vocabulary once known only to criminal lawyers. His own vocabulary has been likewise enriched by a multitude of streetwise teachers, with phrases unknown to de Tocqueville and unfamiliar here crow to all except addicts of American crime soaps.

Every political monstrosity and social disease or absurdity found by Mr O'Rourke in America is in fact all too familiar to us here. We fathered it or now imitate it, providing new bats for American belfries or new homes for American lunacies which Americans have learnt from bitter experience to mistrust and reject. The Western world is like a badly run pest- house in which political and sociological diseases travel, like Aids, unimpeded to and fro, backwards and forwards, here cross-infecting, there re-infecting. All familiar, in fact; but it must be said that Mr ' We'll have to tighten our strings!' O'Rourke's lavish use of slang, argot and jargon is an obstacle to recognition here. President Bush is variously described on one page as having been a `smo' a `smurf and `doofus'. Clearly no compliments are intended, but a traditional English judge ('Who is this Gazza?') would require Mr O'Rourke to be more explicit.

To return to the headings. 'Poverty Poli- cy: How to Endow Privation'; 'Agriculture Policy: How to Tell your Ass from this Particular Hole in the Ground'; 'Among the Compassion Fascists: The National March for Housing Now!'; 'Setting the Chickens to Watch the Henhouse: the Savings-and-Loan Crisis': 'Graft for the Millions: Social Security'.

These cynical one-liners highlight Mr O'Rourke's own ruthlessly iconoclastic conservatism — the icons to be hoist all on the left, of course, though they are dutifully worshipped in many pseudo-conservative noddles, seminars and power-struggles. They give, however, little idea of Mr O'Rourke's outrageous descriptive flair. Very funny, for instance, is his account of a police raid on a filthy crack-house in which the police far outnumber the criminals and the cockroaches far outnumber all. The officers feel the 'Brooklyn butterflies' heading north up their socks. Nobody can take three steps without shaking a leg, as if the police have abandoned investigation to dance a macabre hokey-pokey.

Very funny, too, is life in Peshawar, America's principal Afghan War 'listening post' — journalese for 'place that's close but not too close to the action and has bottled water'. Little, alas, is heard. Journalists attend a press conference at which absolutely no information is divulged. Instead, they are scolded by 'a big affable-faced radical fundamentalist xeno- phobe with a beard you could hatch a Cali- fornia condor in'. 'Journalists should not do divisive things', he says, appositely citing an Afghan proverb about 'trying to find hair in a bowl of dough' — to Mr O'Rourke as apt a description of the journalist's trade as he has lately heard. The search is not aided by distribution of a `press kit', containing a pocket knife, a booklet in Dari, which none of the foreign hacks understand, and other weird aids to comprehension.

Needless to say, the `pig's share' of American aid is directed, for obscure and complex reasons, to the most brutal anti- Western fundmentalist kook available, `with a kisser to make the late Ayatollah Khomeini look like Gidget'. A murderous scorer of own goals, he is accused among many crimes of 'blowing away' one of Afghanistan's 'foremost (not to say only) intellectuals'. Afghanistan, it seems, 'cer- tainly isn't a hotbed of ideas and intellect', nor a new Athens.

In more peaceful circumstances, Mr O'Rourke watches President Bush, the `divine American priest-king', healing the sick, an enormous ceremony on the White House lawn to mark his signature of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Two thousand of the disabled and their fami- ly members were invited to attend in the broiling summer heat. People in wheel chairs were yelling at the deaf to sit down and the blind were bumping the palsied with their dogs. In a crueller age the onlooker might have laughed but we never laugh at misfortune today. In fact we're trying to get in on it.

The Act apparently guarantees that there will be no discrimination in employment. What, scoffs Mr O'Rotirke (from a crueller age?):

Does this mean one-legged firemen?. . . The President, surrounded by very big and un- disabled men from the Secret Service, came up onto a stage where various disabled digni- taries were waiting — examples of why the Americans with Disabilities Act was so need- ed, though they hadn't needed it. The President shook hands with everyone and was halfway to offering his hand to Revd Wilke [who has no arms].

Mr O'Rourke has one foot in that crueller age, one foot prudently kept in our own age, more squeamish. He laughs, or nearly laughs, then kisses it better, wipes away the tears which are in things. Drug abuse: without illusion, he sees the idiocy of neither punishing it nor (in part) legalis- ing it, of setting shrinks fatuously to `counsel' middle-class kids. He sees all this and, looking in the mirror, sees also one who in the hip time abused just about every known drug (with fearful penalties threat- ened then, true), and still abuses one or two from time to time. He cannot afford not to be a bit indulgent, like a gruff uncle with wild oats sown and a twinkle in his eye. His book ends with grandiose sub- Dunciad rhetoric, denouncing all authority as inevitably attracting to its service the lowest elements in the human race, the scum, the most depraved kind of prosti- tutes, who will submit to any indignity, per- form any vile act, do anything to achieve power. 'Every government is a parliament of whores.' Woe, woe, we are meant to cry, woe unto America, though if 'every govern- ment' is so awful, what's so special about hers?

A certain weakness causes Mr O'Rourke to add a final sentence, more soothing and placatory than perhaps he intended; 'The trouble is, in a democracy the whores are us.' Whores all, we are all guilty — what a cop-out! As Hayek has pointed out, where all are held responsible, no one is really responsible. Where all are whores together, all can sleep easy in the whore house.