“Driving Like Crazy: Thirty Years of Vehicular Hell-Bending, Celebrating America the Way It’s Supposed to Be – With an Oil Well in Every Backyard, a Cadillac Escalade in Every Carport, and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Mowing Our Lawn”, by P.J. O’Rourke

 

267 pages, Grove Press, ISBN-13: 978-0802144799

Patrick Jake “P.J.” O’Rourke passed away from lung cancer on February 15^th, 2022, and the Conservative movement in particular and American humor in general lost one of the most original and acerbic voices ever to breath air. I have read and reviewed several of his books, such as Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut: 25 Years of P.J. O’Rourke (reviewed on August 10^th, 2016), Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government (reviewed on January 25^th, 2019), Give War a Chance: Eyewitness Accounts of Mankind’s Struggle against Tyranny, Injustice and Alcohol-Free Beer (reviewed on April 20^th, 2021) and All the Trouble in the World: The Lighter Side of Overpopulation, Famine, Ecological Disaster, Ethnic Hatred, Plague, and Poverty (reviewed on July 16^th, 2021). I will now have to hunt down the rest of his books, for the only way in which we can still enjoy P.J. is by reading and honoring and laughing at all he left behind.

Like Driving Like Crazy (you can read the full title above) which was published in 2009 and collects his many articles featuring cars, driving and fighting the good fight against the regulatory Man. While driving cars and enjoying cars and wrecking cars and celebrating cars is notionally what this book is about, it is also as politically subversive as anything O’Rourke wrote. With tongue firmly in cheek, he recounts many escapades of his wild youth, middle-aged fantasies and crazy trips in a strange mash-up of adolescent political incorrectness, childish silliness and near-religious reverence for American chrome, steel and horsepower. In O’Rourke’s telling, cars are quintessentially American because cars equal freedom: freedom to go where you want and when you want without some busybody central planner telling you NO. Which is why busybody central planners love public transportation and want to kill the oil industry, just so that we all can be more easily under their green totalitarian thumbs.

All of which is recounted across 18 articles and one interview. Driving Like Crazy is, like all of the Late Great P.J.’s work, subversive, entertaining, enlightening and energetic, and makes one miss the man all the more.