60 minutes rewind next subject baby boomers let's begin with a trivia question
who is the most quoted living american in the penguin dictionary of humorous quotations woody
allen steve martin johnny carson wrong here's a clue his last two books made it to the top of the
new york times bestseller list still don't know the answer is pj o'rourke you may never have heard
of him but if you're in your 30s or 40s or early 50s believe me you know him he's the guy on the
leading edge of your generational curve in college he was a hippie and while you were giggling at
the national lampoon he was the editor-in-chief now that you're getting older and becoming more
conservative guess who's become the right wing's favorite political satirist i am frankly nostalgic
for the 1980s when sleeping with the president meant that you'd attended a cabinet meeting
if you want to know why political incumbents are in trouble this year spend some time on the road
with pj o'rourke his suspicious cynical takes on government find a friendly audience among
small businessmen and is smart often smart alecky view of the world has struck a chord
among his fellow jaded baby boomers who crowd into bookstores for his readings i find your political
observation so is too and have made his books like parliament of [ __ ] and give war a chance best
sellers i'm a liberal and i probably should hate everything you're right and maybe it's because
i'm an aging liberal on his way to becoming a conservative but i i find you've been mugged
like many in his audiences he used to wear his hair long smoke dope and believe in free sex
but as he's gotten older and more prosperous he's become less of a libertine
and more of a libertarian which means he harbors a deep suspicion of government
at all levels we've got two political parties in this country um we've got the democrats they're
the party of government activism the party that says that government can make you richer smarter
taller take a dozen strokes off your golf game you know and there are the republicans
they're the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it
o'rourke was born in 1947 the height of the baby boom he grew up in suburban toledo ohio
his father was a buick dealer it was a typical conservative midwestern childhood
and like many of his generation in college he underwent a temporary conversion to the
counterculture he says now because he thought it would improve his social life
you were a hippie you were a child of the 60s yeah yeah
when it came to um letting go of bourgeois proprieties i let go with both hands
it's definitely up to my neck in that you tried all of the aspects of the lifestyle um lots
of drugs lots of screaming about capitalism you know lots of protesting against the war
in vietnam what you think about was very self-serving they were trying to send me
to the war of vietnam you know so of course i was against it but sex drugs and rock and roll didn't
stop o'rourke from earning a degree winning a scholarship to graduate school at johns hopkins
and starting an underground newspaper in baltimore called harry when he realized
there was no future in the revolution he headed off to new york city and the national lampoon
where he quickly discovered that subversive humor fetched a far better paycheck than
subversive politics by the time he was 31 o'rourke was editor-in-chief of the lampoon
running a multi-million dollar enterprise turning out a slick glossy monthly collection of sophomore
humor about breasts buttocks and ethnic attributes read me about the australia australians yes racial
characteristics violently loud alcoholic rough necks whose idea of fun is to throw up on your car
never go to australia again you couldn't write this anymore nah i'm all grown up the complete
freedom from ever worrying about offending anybody i think that's probably the nicest thing about
the national lampoon because if it ever crept into your mind that this might offend somebody
the natural and immediate response as a trained lampooner was yes that's a fabulous idea
let's do two of them everything was a target everything was a target wow we had it was so
much fun at the national lampoon because it was truly an adolescent's dream so then you went to
work for rolling stone then i went to work for rolling stone right i moved right up the uh a
stairway of respectability to a really solid uh old respectable middle class institution rolling
stone that was 13 years ago and he's still there using the same subversive sense of humor
he developed at the lampoon to report on serious events he's become the rock magazine's reactionary
combining the literary flair of hunter thompson with the ideology and haberdashery of george will
he holds the impressive title foreign affairs desk chief which he says looks great on the
masthead but there is no foreign affairs desk at rolling stone in o'rourke never goes to the office
most of the time he operates out of the trunk of a rental car in some god-forsaken part of the world
nursing an inherently weak constitution with bottles of pepto-bismol we caught up with him in
his ever-present cigar last summer in southern mexico where he was covering that country's
national election okay they've got one political party that steals every election we've got two
political parties that steal every election how does that make us twice as good or twice as bad
it definitely makes us similar o'rourke's first rule of journalism stay away from people in power
the reason is fundamentally that they lie they lie a highly placed government official did not
get to be in a position of power and importance by being stupid enough to tell the truth to newspaper
reporters instead o'rourke relies on observation and attitude he is the star of his own stories the
misadventures of an innocent abroad in strange lands foreign correspondent loses his patience
and his wallet what he does he says is take a very conventional middle-aged midwestern sensibility to
some very peculiar places on the fall of communism a huge totalitarian system has been brought to its
knees because nobody wants to wear bulgarian shoes from the gulf war not only is this the first live
televised war it's also the first war covered by sober journalists when he's home pj o'rourke
leads a disciplined life writing a steady 1000 words a day he cultivates the literary persona
of a cigar-smoking hard-drinking fast driving womanizing martini-guzzling slob cocktail time
but in fact he lives in a new hampshire farmhouse that could have been decorated by martha stewart
and his life there is almost bucolic more barbecues than bar room brawls you never go away
hungry and you never go away that persona which was sort of developed at the national lampoon was
when i was 30 it was an exaggeration now that i'm 47 it is what we technically call a lie
i do drink but uh that's probably about the about the end of it what's the difference between your
persona and the real pj or uh the person is louder and dumber you know this is basically because i i
use myself as a clown figure in the work it's nice to have somebody in the story that you
know is not going to sue you that you can say absolutely anything about you can make them do
any foolish thing and have any ridiculous opinion and they will never ever sue you
if you've got a great funny line that's coming just popped into your head it's not quite right
but it's a great laugh what do you do you use it i use it of course because that's a the rule one is
to entertain and if the line is off the mark then i'll use the next sentence to explain well it's
not really quite true you know you can always back off a joke you know that's the nice thing about
jokes incidentally you can't back off a serious statement the story will continue after this
in his latest book all the trouble in the world he goes after environmentalists population
planners and others whom he calls professional warriors and whiners among other things he hates
repressed memory syndrome multiculturalism berkeley california and al gore he's willing
to offend almost everyone even advocates for the handicap he calls them compassion fascists and he
says they've been at work building a ramp at the post office in peterborough new hampshire this
wheelchair ramp in front of the post office this was required by the americans with disabilities
act and this is a long and fairly steep and fairly narrow ramp i think basically you'd have to be a
special olympics athlete to get your wheelchair up this thing o'rourke says there's a more convenient
ramp at the post office's back door it's been there since the 1930s and has worked just fine
but according to the americans with disabilities act that's not good enough because that treats
people with disabilities differently than the rest of us are treated and so there has to be a
ramp in the front and the only thing it's used for is kids on skateboards the advocates would
seem to have the law and some would argue logic on their side oh you can have logic on your side no
problem what i'm saying is they don't have common sense on their side and a lot of human life should
be guided most of human life should be guided by common sense and not by legal quibbling that seems
like a really hard approach i mean to go after the disabilities act american disabilities act i mean
that seems like such a heartless position totally devoid of humanity how could anybody possibly be
against good things for the disabled how could anybody take such a rotten awful position as that
well i can and it's for this reason is that the the purpose of this law was to make george bush
feel good and to make congress people feel good and to a certain extent i suppose make voters
feel good this ramp doesn't helping anybody with disabilities there already was a ramp nobody with
disabilities is using this ramp this ramp is there's a hundred thousand dollar monument to
patting oneself upon the back some of his friends say o'rourke is a lot more sophisticated than
he lets on that he writes for effect and for sales you really believe everything you write
oh good question of course not you know but uh i think that there's you know there there's
some root cause some seed some kernel in there of some of something that i believe you know uh i'm
a humorous do i exaggerate for a fact of course i exaggerate for a fact some people have said and i
know you've probably read it you know pj is very calculated um go back and look at him when he was
writing for harry and he was a hippie then he turns up at the national lampoon as an
editor then he goes to work for rolling stone a politically liberal publication and now when it's
become fashionable to be conservative and right wing what you're doing is becoming a conservative
commentator that really you're an opportunist definitely you know there's no doubt about that i
am i'm very ambitious person and um i was a hippie when it was fun to be hippie it would have been
very stupid to have been a hippie in the 50s and even stupider to be one in the 80s but
the end of the 60s beginning of the 70s it was a great time to be a hippie
but definitely i'm not an artist you know i i'm a journalist and i like to get stuff published
i like to make money and i like to get a lot of readers if i possibly can and so
have i changed with the times well god what a strange person i would be if i hadn't you know