“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.