“Give War a Chance: Eyewitness Accounts of Mankind's Struggle against Tyranny, Injustice and Alcohol-Free Beer”, by P. J. O’Rourke

 

233 pages, Atlantic Monthly Press, ISBN-13: 978-0871135209

It’s hard to believe that P. J. O’Rourke was ever a leftist, but according to him he veered to the right the day he got his first paycheck and saw the cost of the welfare state he and all of the other Long-Haired, Maggot-Infested, Dope-Smoking FM Rock ‘N’ Roller Types wanted…but there you have it, proof that a Conservative is just a Liberal who has been mugged by reality. In Give War a Chance: Eyewitness Accounts of Mankind’s Struggle against Tyranny, Injustice and Alcohol-Free Beer, O’Rourke collects several of his works together from various sources in book form so that his right-wing fans wouldn’t have to stop to buying unwanted issues of Rolling Stone and other lefty publications (although it was published by Atlantic Monthly Press, damnit). This was back in the days when there was no Internet, no Conservative radio or Fox News; we only knew what the liberal left chose to tell us or, just as common, not tell us (The New York Times, for example, had deliberately hid the Russian famines and the genocide of Ukrainian farmers; from then on everything we were told of the Soviet Union was framed under the rubric of “moral equivalency”).

O’Rourke is at his sarcastic best in this book; for example, he does not mind being called a Nazi by liberals because “no one has ever had a fantasy about being tied to a bed and sexually ravished by someone dressed as a liberal”. Speaking of the causes of the Soviet collapse, he writes that “a huge and totalitarian system with all its tanks and guns, gulag camps and secret police has been brought to its knees because nobody wants to wear Bulgarian shoes”. In this fashion does O’Rourke explore the bewilderment felt by Conservatives and Liberals alike at the intensive hatred felt by its peoples at the “noble experiment” of Marxism. What must surprise the average reader today is that, although we do now have alternate news sources, the liberal media presents its biased news as if we Americans were still ignorant of the true state of the world. As just one example, the Obama Administration was and is presented with a holy nimbus surrounding it, despite its obvious incompetence and its failures. It is no wonder that American leftists have such a visceral hatred of O’Rourke that they cannot enjoy his wit and humor. For everyone else, this is a delightful, informative read.