Legendary journalist and political satirist P.J. O’Rourke has died from lung cancer complications at 74. The news was confirmed by his publisher Grove Atlantic in a statement Tuesday.
O’Rourke — a libertarian famed for his razor-sharp wit — notably skewered both Democrats and Republicans in print and on television.
“Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys,” O’Rourke famously wrote in 1991. He later described the presidency of Barack Obama as “the Carter administration in better sweaters.”
O’Rourke gained national attention writing for humor magazine the National Lampoon in the 1970s, before going on to pen pieces for Playboy, Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone. He also published more than a dozen best-selling books, including 1987’s “Republican Party Reptile.”
Here’s an opportunity to listen to him talking about boomers like me.
“Just this whole process of going through the baby boom’s history, I began to realize what a nicer society—kinder, more decent society—that we live in today than the society when I was a kid,” says P.J. O’Rourke, best-selling author of Holidays in Hell, Parliament of Whores, and many other titles.
O’Rourke sat down with Reason’s Nick Gillespie at Freedom Fest 2014 in Las Vegas to discuss his new book, The Baby Boom: How it Got That Way and It Wasn’t My Fault and I’ll Never Do it Again. As the father of three kids born between 1997 and 2004, he also lays down some thoughts about millennials, noting that they live in a much nicer, more tolerant world than the one in which he grew up. “I don’t think my 10-year old boy has ever been in a fist fight,” says O’Rourke, who was born in 1947. “I mean there might be a little scuffling but I don’t think he’s has ever had that kind of violent confrontation that was simply part of the package when I was a kid.”
He also feels that the internet “fragments information” in a way that destroys the sweep of history, at least at first. “You end up with mosaic information,” he says. “Now, I think over time the kids put these mosaics together but I don’t think the internet itself lends itself to the sweep of history.” The interview also includes a tour of O’Rourke’s long and varied career in journalism, from his humble beginnings writing for an underground alt-weekly to his time as editor of National Lampoon and his incredible work as a foreign correspondent for Rolling Stone to his current position as columnist at the Daily Beast.
A prominent libertarian, O’Rourke also discusses the difficulties in selling a political philosophy devoted to taking power away from politicians. “If libertarianism were easy to explain and if it weren’t so easy to exaggerate the effects of libertarianism—people walking around with ‘Legalize Heroin!’ buttons and so on—I think it would’ve been done already,” says O’Rourke. “But the problem is, of course, is that libertarianism isn’t political. It’s anti-political, really. It wants to take things out of the political arena.”
For full transcript, links, downloadable versions, and more, visit http://reason.com/reasontv/2014/08/26… and subscribe to Reason TV’s YouTube channel for daily content like this.