“Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government”, by P. J. O’Rourke

233 pages, Atlantic Monthly Press, ISBN-13: 978-0871134554

Ah, the heady days of 1991: I was fresh out of prison…er, high school, bumming around going to community college, working here and there, and reading and thinking and philosophizing and solving all of the problems of the world if people would just listen to me you ignorant bags of puss-filled excr…sorry, let me bring that back a little. Politics and, more importantly, political theory were still new to me, and Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government by P. J. O’Rourke was one of the books that awakened my still-burgeoning conservative/libertarian (libertarian/conservative?) leanings. Have you have ever asked yourself, “Is Washington DC full of nothing but posturing idiots?” P.J. answers with a resounding, “Uh…yeah”. Armed with a factual knowledge of how D.C. dysfunctions and leavened with keen wit, O’Rourke takes us on a tour of the institutions of our Government, from the Congress to 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; we just want the other fella 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 41, before the Big Creep, 9/11, any of the Gulf Wars and, of course, the Savior Obama or his orange replacement, it really would be overwhelmingly depressing how little things have changed and how the D.C. 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 stiletto 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 D.C.’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.

“The Mad King: The Life and Times of Ludwig II of Bavaria”, by Greg King

335 pages, Citadel, ISBN-13: 978-1559723626

Der Märchenkönig – “The Fairy Tale King” – is one of the kinder epithets for Ludwig II of Bavaria (another being Der verrückte König, “The Mad King”, by-the-by), and it is this moniker that Greg King prefers in The Mad King: The Life and Times of Ludwig II of Bavaria. Like many a modern monarch, Ludwig II reigned but never ruled, seeing that he is remembered almost wistfully as the storybook-handsome young sovereign whose early promise ended in insanity and a mysterious death – the day after his forced abdication on June 12^th, 1886, his body was found in Lake Starnberg, a presumed suicide. Neither lawgiver nor warrior, Ludwig left behind several dreamy, mock-Gothic castles and the music dramas of Wagner, whom he patronized. King’s book is, I believe, rather more informative about Ludwig’s upbringing and inadequate preparation for his royal role than previous biographies, especially about his “fragile sexual identity”; after his marriage to Duchess Sophie Charlotte Augustine in Bavaria was finally cancelled, he hid away in castles far from the capital of Munich in order to better carry on what he thought were clandestine liaisons with a series of princes and stable boys; by the time he turned 30, dissipation had cost him his health and his looks (his relationship with Wagner, whom he had championed for 18 years, also went sour). Despite King’s attempt to sentimentalize Ludwig and transform him into a more tragic and sympathetic character, his pathetic, decadent life repels more than it enthralls. A well-written book about a superfluous man, The Mad King has one great addition to the lore of this lunatic: his version of Ludwig’s final days makes a lot more sense to me than any conspiracy or suicide theory ever did, and for that reason alone you should read this book.

“Galileo: A Life”, by James Reston

288 pages, HarperCollins, ISBN-13: 978-0060163785

Galileo: A Life by James Reston is an excellent biography of Western science’s premier protagonists; Reston, utilizing a mere 288 pages, discusses many complicated aspects of science and religion, and yet he never gets bogged down in any monotonous detail. Much of the relevance of Galileo’s life comes from our now being in the grip of political correctness, much of it (let’s be honest) revolving around sex, which we are now told is simply a matter of choice. It is rather reminiscent of the Catholic Church who charged that the spots on the sun and the satellites around Jupiter, as discovered by Galileo and personally shown to them through his telescope, were “illusory” or “conjurors tricks”. But at least the Church had a reason for their blinkeredness, its religious doctrines having predated these scientific discoveries; today’s church of political correctness has no such excuse. On the brighter side, today only careers and reputations are burnt at the stake, not people…yet.

Who knew how fascinating Galileo was? I read the book and found him to be incredibly arrogant and at times rather petty (well, why not? He was Galileo, after all), but Reston really brings the whole person alive, the good and the bad. It’s a fascinating read, as besides the life of this scientific giant, you learn quite a bit about the historical period in which he flourished and suffered under. Renaissance Italy was antithetical to our world: music was a branch of mathematics; physicians used astrology to diagnose illnesses; ten-pound stones fell ten times as fast as one-pound stones; the sun obediently circled the Earth; and the Vatican, reeling from the Reformation, fiercely wielded its will from the center of that world. In this world, Galileo’s life and work came to embody the conflict between science and religion that echoes even today. You learn, in short, not just Galileo the scientist, but about Galileo the man, whom Einstein called “the father of modern physics”.

A major storyline throughout the book was Galileo’s many health struggles; mostly by reading between the lines, it seems that much of the trouble was due to hypochondria…or was it? The book screams out for a chapter devoted to spelling out exactly what these health problems were, and that such a chapter was not included is doubly strange since Reston is so clearly analytical in other mysterious and complex areas, and also because you would think that this would be one subject that would be very amenable to informed historical speculation, looking at his symptoms in light of today’s medicine, and so forth. In summary, despite this one very significant flaw of failing to come to terms directly with Galileo’s ill health, this is a fine book that is very relevant even four centuries later, particularly in light of today’s enemies of the scientific method and the free discussion of its results.