“Peace Kills: America’s Fun New Imperialism”, by P. J. O’Rourke

 

320 pages, Atlantic Monthly Press, ISBN-13: 978-0871139191

Whenever I see P. J. O’Rourke’s name on anything, my first inclination is to buy first without bothering to find out just what it is about, which is what I did with Peace Kills: America’s Fun New Imperialism, which covers various American efforts to police the world, beginning with Kosovo in 1999 and concluding shortly after the fall of Baghdad in 2003. If it was intended to be a travel diary, the book is fine, as he writes about what he saw and heard and experienced during his travels; otherwise, it is a rather disorganized hodgepodge of articles and ruminations. He never disappoints when it comes to making fun of peace protesters – they tend to be a stupid bunch, after all – but he is hilarious when making fun of Nobel Prize winners and their illiterate and easily disprovable political assertions about poverty. O’Rourke doesn’t end there, though, as he makes fun of everything from the Department of Homeland Security, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (if you can believe that), his travels in Egypt (if a bit long-windedly so), and many other topics, besides.

Overall, Peace Kills is what you would expect out of a baby-boomer reformed hippy libertarian pessimist who has participated in the downfall of pop culture: a worldly, skeptical view of our modern earthly monkey house, tinged with a libertarian sensibility informed by, if nothing else, decades of chemically induced self-abuse and what must have been many close calls with the cops, but also tempered by an older-but-wiser Celtic resignation to fate and an acceptance of the persistent limitations of the human race – a kind of successor of H. L. Mencken for the crown of Weary Worldly Cynic. O’Rourke launches into one free-form monologue after another with his readers, painting word pictures and demolishing cherished beliefs with comedic but nonetheless cogent jabs loaded with a resigned knowing, aimed at the almost limitless opportunities for ridicule presented by the currently reigning Politically Correct establishment worldview.