DACHVARD

Patrick Jake O'Rourke (1947–2022) spent fifty years making the same observation in different forms: government is run by people who want power over other people, this is never a good situation, and the best response is to keep them as busy as possible arguing with each other. He said it covering wars for Rolling Stone and foreign elections for The Atlantic, and he said it from the couch in his New Hampshire farmhouse.

He came up through National Lampoon in the 1970s, became its editor-in-chief in 1978, and then walked out into the louder career that suited him better - foreign correspondence with a humorist's eye. The Rolling Stone Foreign Affairs Desk Chief title was given to him by Jann Wenner mostly as a joke; O'Rourke took it seriously enough to actually go to all the places. He filed from Beirut, Belgrade, Managua, Manila, Sarajevo, and Baghdad. The dispatches were funny because the situations were genuinely funny if you happened to be of a particular cast of mind, which was his.

He was a registered Republican who supported gay marriage, drug legalisation, and the abolition of farm subsidies. He had a consistent political theory - leave people alone - and was honest about it making him nearly unemployable in both parties. In 2016 he endorsed Hillary Clinton on the grounds that she was “the second-worst thing that could happen to America.” The first-worst won.

The Method

O'Rourke's technique was to go somewhere terrible, drink heavily, talk to taxi drivers and prime ministers in roughly equal proportions, and then write it up in a register that combined Mark Twain, H.L. Mencken, and a Holiday Inn lobby. The persona was that of a slightly drunk uncle who happened to have read Adam Smith, James Madison, and the entire history of the Republican Party in the United States. The persona was nearly the truth.

The books are mostly collections - Holidays in Hell, Give War a Chance, All the Trouble in the World, Peace Kills. The structure of each is the same: a tour of places that are coming apart, narrated by a man who finds the coming-apart absurd in ways that the other reporters in the bar do not. Two of them, Parliament of Whores (1991) and Eat the Rich (1998), are sustained arguments rather than collections - the former about the United States Congress, the latter about why some countries are rich and others poor. Parliament in particular ought to have been one of the most-read political books of its decade. It was, by satirists; the political class continued to behave as if it had not.

The Inventory

The remarks below are gathered from his books, columns, and broadcast appearances. The collection skews political because the politics outlasted the topical reporting; the dispatches from Beirut and Managua have aged into history and the dispatches from Capitol Hill remain depressingly current. Where a remark is funny in a way that does not require knowing the original target, it has been kept; where it requires too much footnoting, it has not.