Message lost in clichéd rant

Don’t Vote: It only encourages the bastards

They come around before elections to promise you the earth and you never see them again. They’re power-hungry fat cats. They get special training in how to lie and fudge on television and never answer a straight question. They cheat on their expenses, promote their pals and swan around in Mercs at our expense.

Politicians have never been popular, but they’re currently hated with a warmth and concentrated conviction that’s new. And not just in Ireland. That PJ O’Rourke’s new collection of essays about the body politic is likely to be a bestseller suggests that contempt for the people elected to make our laws is rampant in the US too.

O’Rourke’s work is a mixture of humour and political theory. His is a smart, analytical and well-read mind with a gift for moving from over-arching philosophical thought to the down-and-dirty sloganeering exemplified by the title of the new collection. Although best known in the US, he has a following in Ireland and Britain, not least because of the way he sums up what many people on both sides of the Atlantic think but don’t say, like their reaction to climate change:

“There’s not a goddam thing you can do about it ... There are 1.3 billion people in China, and they all want a Buick.”

The essential difference between O’Rourke and the late Molly Ivins, a comparable wit and analyst, is that Ivins loved all aspects of politics and politicians with an indiscriminate delight. She hung out with crooks, knaves and philanderers and made her readers feel affectionate toward all three.

O’Rourke, on the other hand, likes politics (at least in theory), but dislikes politicians with a visceral contempt and fury. In that regard, the bitter and twisted view he has developed over the decades matches the mood of Ireland right now.

“We should remind ourselves of the purpose of voting,” he says. “We don’t vote to elect a great person to office. They’re not that great. We vote to throw the bastards out.”

He also says, in a statement peculiarly apposite in Ireland at the moment, that “you can remove morality from politics like you can remove the head from a chicken, and they’ll both keep going — politics much longer than the chicken.”

O’Rourke’s work is delightful in describing those character-types that appear in every life. In one such section he looks at Committee Brain in order to demonstrate how great ideas, originated by pleasant, enthusiastic, public-spirited neighbours in a given community, turn into deadwood. His example of such an idea is the desire to create a location for the neighbouring kids to play Tetherball. (I assume Tetherball is the sport where the ball is batted around, but doesn’t escape, because an umbilical cord attaches it to a central pole) One of the characters he identifies as likely to be found within the committee to promote the Tetherball Park is The Dog in the Manger.

“We need to get permission from the County Zoning Board, the City Council, the Parks Department and adjacent landowners who may complain about tetherball noise,” says the Dog in the Manger. “We can’t do any fundraising without advertising. We can’t advertise without raising funds. The kids would rather have a tennis court.”

Sitting across from this type is another, described by O’Rourke as The Person with Ideas, None of Which Has Anything to do with Tetherball.

“Is the tether biodegradable?” demands The Person with Ideas. “Is the pole made from recycled materials? Many playground balls are manufactured in third world countries using exploitative child labour. Let’s be sure to utilise organic fertiliser and indigenous plant species ... ”

O’Rourke’s durable popularity lies in the dodgem-car approach he takes to his themes. The irreverent follows directly on from the thoughtful, and insight bumps into vulgar abuse, all of this flowing from his own progress from a drug-addled hippie to an angry Republican journalist who describes all causes as boring.

“They are a way of making yourself part of something bigger and more exciting,” he says, “which guarantees that small, tedious selves are what a cause will attract.”

This particular collection is flawed by a heavy-handed, relentless facetiousness that is rarely funny. O’Rourke knows he’s in the entertainment business, but seems to have come to the belief that the readers of his books have an attention deficit disorder that renders them so prone to boredom as to require him to crack a joke, toss off an epigram, or coin a witty phrase the moment he has completed a serious paragraph, lest they turn to Twitter or start texting friends.

He may be right in this assessment of his readers but this over-anxious tickling of the funnybone is not only irritating but seriously distracts from the book’s more thoughtful and significant ideas about democracy and its current ills.