Sure he coos, "Are you the cutest thing on earth or what?" to his one-year-old. Yes, he can hold forth intelligently on the virtues of Disney's Tarzan. And seeing him carry a basket of toys from F.A.O. Schwarz does seem a little like watching Colin Powell play with Pokémon cards.
But P.J. O'Rourke's newest book doesn't show his softer side. The man who over the years has proven that "funny conservative" doesn't need to be an oxymoron, still knocks boy bands and NATO in the same breath. Yet we wondered about P.J. the man. On a Saturday, PW made the trip to his New Hampshire home, where, after a family picnic and an emergency outing to "The Velveteen Rabbit," O'Rourke tried to put our concerns to rest.
PW: There's talk in this book of bedtime stories and proper childhood nutrition. Readers want to know: Is P.J. O'Rourke jumping to the other side?
O'Rourke: Well, the book looks like it's about family, but it's not. It's a very cheap device to throw together a bunch of stuff that was sitting in my files. I owed Morgan Entrekin a book. And then I came across The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes and was charmed by it. He had discovered a way to cobble together all sorts of crap that he'd been writing for years. And I thought, "I've got to steal this."
PW: As usual, you write a lot about Washington. What bothers you most about the current state of politics?
O'Rourke: Politics sees itself as a panacea, and it's not. I'm very antiabortion. But the abortion question will not be solved in the courts or the legislatures. People will stop having abortions when they think it's wrong.
PW: So you'd still call yourself a libertarian?
O'Rourke: Yes, but not with a capital L. The capital L libertarian is the high school calculus teacher backing you into a corner over some warm white wine and explaining why the sidewalks should be privatized. Lovely guy, really nice person and for all I know he's right about the sidewalks. But it makes for a damn uninteresting hour-and-a-half.
PW: You've been pretty hard on Bush. Not as hard as you were on Clinton, but hard.
O'Rourke: Bush is a guy whom I think I would personally like, and yet I'm ticked off at him for all sorts of things he's doing, like starting all these entitlement programs. What happened during the Clinton era was that, as a pundit, you end up turning on the American people, and there's little profit in that. You think: you idiots, you go for the WWF, People magazine and now Bill Clinton. But then, wait a minute, where does this line of thinking run?
PW: Not to many freelance checks.
O'Rourke: Right. And next thing you know, you've got a talk-radio show that's worse than Rush Limbaugh—it's Ezra Pound. The original bad talk-radio host.
PW: You're pretty curmudgeonly on technology.
O'Rourke: I hate cell phones. They take all the fun out of being far away. I hate computers. I'm a mechanical creature. I just threw up my hands at the e-mail thing. I think there should be a law that says that one month every year people can communicate only in person or in ink on nice paper, by post office.
PW: How does that square with your libertarianism?
O'Rourke: Not very well. But isn't consistency the bugbear of little minds.
PW: Speaking of little minds...
O'Rourke: Yeah, I don't know how Hillary Clinton is doing in the Senate. She doesn't seem to be doing much. But as I say in the book, the Senate is a tar pit. Nobody does much of anything.
PW: There are critics who would say you go for the punch line first and ideology second.
O'Rourke: Point well taken. I'll go for a punch line no matter how much it violates what I think, and explain later. Same goes for a good story. There are some things that are much too good to subject to the discourtesies of investigative journalism.
