Transcripts For CSPAN2 Books By P.J. ORourke 20240712

Satirists p. J. Orourke. He has appeared on booktv close to 20 times. First up in 2007 on our monthly call in program in depth p. J. Orourke discusses politics, writing and why he uses humor to discuss political and social issues. Is that a real picture of you . Guest oh yeah. Not a we. That was 71. Not quite positive. Host what were your politics in 1971 . Guest a martian left would be the easiest way to summon up. I was a leftwinger but didnt make enough sense to be a communist or anything like that. Host when did the transformation occur . Guest it was gradual. I just wrote about this. There is a book coming out from the Hoover Institution backing this called why i turned right, the story, it is a long story and i wont tell it. I will give the short version. I was a radical leftist very much in favor of a marxist socialist thing in america. I got a job paying 150 a week. I was a messenger in new york, 150 a week was a lot of money, living on the Lower East Side and i was very broke, got paid every two weeks, looking forward to that 300 bucks and so was my landlord i must say and my drug dealer and a lot of other people. I got my first paycheck, made out 178 or something, was supposed to be 300 bucks but after federal tax, estate tax, city tax, Social Security, healthcare, i said wait a minute. I have been advocating socialism, marxism, communism for years, demonstrating in the street and we already have it. They just took half my pay. What is going on . I am not rockefeller. They just took half my pay. We have socialism. That is when i started to snap out of it. Host somebody else who made a switch in their politics is Christopher Hitchens. Guest much more recently. Host in 1993 here is what he had to say about you. He is another exleftist, 60s radical dropout, what it was like being permanently stoned in the 60s, casting in this chip ever since and has a terrific following as a humorist for his books of essays. The first is quite funny, Republican Party reptile and the next one is called holidays in hell and the more recent one is good war chants and it gets me down so this is my revenge upon him. The best guy to hang out with in a bar. He was running on empty with this joke about i have been radical, now i see how wonderful it would be to be a completely but not buttondown tori and the joke basically depends on political correctness, people made jokes about aids, pj will make a joke about aids and i said look, quite funny but not funny enough. Guest Christopher Christopher christopher getting away with murder. I might get away with slander, verbal assault. I dont think just a little guy, never gotten away with physical assault. He overstates the case. Also of course long past the point i can claim to be a young republican buttondown or not. I am an old republican like most middleaged white guys. We are all republicans even if we call ourselves Something Else like democrat. Host you didnt think you were going to come over here and get attacked, did you . Holidays in her, adequate book for rude people, first book, first book, when was this put out . Guest the original edition was 1983. Host eat the rich. What is this about . Guest it got me started on what wound up being adam smith. I was simply puzzled. I didnt understand why some countries are rich and other countries are poor so i started poking around going to rich countries and poor countries trying to see if i could figure out why this country was richer other countries were poor and it was from that experience the toby monday the editor of Grove Atlantic who came up with the idea of a series of books the change the world of which my book on adam smith, Christopher Hitchens has one on thomas paine. It was because of poking around in adam smith the toby asked me to write. Host in mississippi you are on with p. J. Orourke. Kenneth in new jersey, go ahead. Caller not sure why p. J. Orourke deserve to be taken seriously with all the time on his show when a man who i suspect never wore the uniform and i suspect from hearing about his politics in the vietnam era would have done his darndest to avoid wearing the uniform can be so flippant about war. I happen to have been a republican for 50 years, voted three times for Richard Nixon and twice for ronald reagan, thousands of americans have been killed, tens of thousands of iraqis have been killed, no useful purpose served by this war it is abominable that p. J. Orourke can make fun of war and find something amusing about it but the question i want to ask, he talks about the imperative of free markets. Do you have any conception why we have things like minimum wage laws, maximum hour laws and osha laws, does he remember the condition that existed in america before we had those laws and laborers were obliged to work 12 hour days, 6day weeks . Is that what p. J. Orourke thinks is freedom . Host we will get to the free market question in a second but guest one on republican. Host he was on the democratic line. In your dedication to give war a chance here is what you write. Like many men of my generation i had an opportunity to give war a chance and promptly chickened out. I went to my draft physical with a doctors letter about my history of drug abuse, the letter was 4 and a half pages long with 3 and a half pages devoted to listing the drugs i abuse. I was shunted into the office of an Army Psychiatrist at the end of a 45 minute interview, was pounding his desk and shouting you dont belong in the army. He was certainly right on the first count and possibly right on the second. Anyway i didnt have to go but that meant someone else had to go in my place. I would like to get indicate dedicate this book to him. I hope you got back in your place, hope you were more used your putin made that you would have been. Hope youre rich and happy now in 1971 when someone punched me in the face for being a longhaired piece creep i hope it noticed you. Guest i got some nice letters from people who thought they had punched me in the face and said they appreciate it. To begin at the beginning of what the fellow on the phone said i never ask anybody to take me seriously. As to making fun of war lets put it this way. A bad situation, war, like a bad disease, like death itself isnt changed by whether you make fun of it or you dont. We make fun of things not because we approve of the more love them, not because they are cuddly and cute. We make fun of things to cope with our own terror, our own unease, our own existence horror, our anger, our disappointment with ourselves etc. And so forth. Humor is a defense mechanism. You can make a joke, you can take drugs, you can make yourself all pompous and pious, or you can do all those things. Whether i make fun of war dont make fun of war will not make war better, wars will make war worse. As to free markets and minimum wage and people working in call mines and working 49 hours a day 9 days a week and so on and so forth it is interesting when you say you are in favor of free markets you get that response. It is not at all what adam smith meant. What adam smith was talking about was keeping coercion out of life and keeping coercion out of marketplaces is only one aspect of keeping coercion out of life. Adam smiths whole wealth of nations, the essays that he wrote, very important book he wrote that no one reads about the theory of moral sentiments about morality was all about making people rely upon persuasion and to give up brute force. That is the core of morality, the core of free society, the core of democracy but adam smith didnt know that. He lived in a Free Democratic era and didnt quite understand how democracy could work but he did understand freedom of war, he was a moral and practical and just a plain sort of sympathetic advocate of freedom and at the root of freedom is persuasion. The idea you want free markets does not mean you want markets pulled by force or that you want markets ruled by anarchy. And applies, it is not prescriptive, doesnt tell us exactly how to conduct the free market, doesnt give us exact rules, it tells us there should be rules and we should all obey the rules. Like theyve had in this white house and like they will have in this congress. So to the very angry caller, i would just like to say this first i have no idea why three hours and should be wasted on me and im not going to say there is a good reason. They asked me. What can i tell you . But because you have certain ideas how freedom should be conducted and you may well be right and i respect those ideas and those ideas are worth arguing about, but dont just because you want to limit certain freedoms in the market. You may be wise and it may be the correct thing to do to limit those freedoms but dont be smug about your desire to limit freedom. Everybody who wants to limit freedom from those who desire that there be human slavery to the taliban, to people who are in favor of minimum wage laws, everybody is smug about their desire to limit human freedoms. Some human freedoms really do need to be limited. That doesnt make you a good person for recognizing that. It may make you a wise person or a a sensible person, assuming your arguments are good but youre not a good person. You deserve no smugness and you dont deserve to be, to vent your anger on foolish innocent humorous just because youre some desire to limit, so there. P. J. Orourke has appeared on booktv close to 20 times over the past 20 years. Up next he provides a tribute to the american automobile while discussing his book driving like crazy. This event was held at the Peterson Automotive Museum in los angeles in june 2009. It is im afraid the last time to say, how shall we put it, sayonara to the american car. American automobile companies, ford, gm, chrysler will live on in some form, i kind of margulies ghost dragging their chains at taxpayers expense. The fools in the corner offices of detroit and the fool officials at detroit units will retire to the vacation homes in palm beach and st. Petersburg respectively. They dont deserve our sympathy anymore than the malevolent trolls under the capitol dome in washington do but pity the poor american car when congress and the white house get through with it. A lightweight vehicle with a small Carbon Footprint using alternative energy and Renewable Resources to operate in a sustainable way. When i was a kid we called it a schwinn. Its been a great 110 years ten years, been a great run. 110 years since the brothers of the first automobile in springfield, massachusetts. If the motorbike and company if itd been a success springfield, massachusetts, might be todays motor city full of abandoned houses, and upon, drug dealing, Violent Crime and racial tension which as it so happens springfield, massachusetts, is full of anyway. But we owe the american car, we always a lot more than the entertaining spectacle of detroits various felon mayors. Many people my age we owe our very existence to the car or to the cars backseat. Where if you check our parents wedding anniversary with our birthdate and find them a little too close to comfort that is probably where we were conserved. There was no premarital sex and america before the invention of the internal combustion engine. Its true. You couldnt sneak a girl into the rec room of your farmhouse because your mom and dad didnt have a car so he couldnt commute so they were stuck home all day working on the farm. Your farmhouse didnt have rec room because recreation had not been discovered due to all the farm work. On saturday that you could take control out in a buggy but it was hard to get her into the mood to let you bust into her corset because you were facing behind in of the course and it just spoils the atmosphere. The cars let us out of the barn and while the car was added the car destroyed the American Nuclear family and anyone whos had an American Nuclear family can tell you that was a relief to all concerned. Cars cost america to be paved. There are much worse things you do to the country than pave it as the sudanese have proven over in darfur. One of the things i wanted is we never hear a thank you, not a word of thanks as car people forget all america paid for the kids in the body cast who skateboard all the time. Not a word of thanks. Cars provided america with an individual standard of living. You could not get a steady job with high wages and Health Retirement benefits working on the general Livestock Corporation assemblyline putting others on cows. It just couldnt be done. Utters. The american car was a source of intellectual stimulation, intellectual stimulation. Think of the innovation. The invention, the sheer genius that transformed the 1908 model t ford into the 1968 shelby cobra gt500 in the course of one single human lifetime full of speeding tickets. Compare this to the progress in the previous mode of transportation. Horse production, horse design unchanged for thousands of years. When it comes to creativity with the horse i did research on this when i was writing about the stuff. I looked at it. Nobody thought to put a stirrup, nobody thought to hang a stirrup from a saddle until about 500 a. D. , the stirrup was invented. People have been riding writins for thousands of years and took them until 500 a. D. To invent this. Where were they putting their feet . If automobile design and engineering have proceeded at the same pace as horse design and engineering we would be powering ourselves down the road by running with both our feet stuck through hole on the floor like fred flintstone, although it may come to that with the 2010 obama mobile. But most important of all, most important of all was the cars fulfilled the ideal of americas founding fathers. Of all the truths that we hold to be self evident, of all of the unalienable rights with which we are endowed, which one is most important to the American Dream . It is right there front and center, flat in the name of the declaration of independence, freedom to leave. Freedom to get out of town. Freedom to get the hell out of here. King george, can i have the keys . Thats in the declaration of independence. I have to tell you the stock of the american car, this is not an abstract matter to me. This is the subject of fanciful theories. Nancy pelosi may think she was transported home from the Maternity Ward on pink fluffy clouds supported by seraphim. Low carbon seraphim. But i know it was the car that got me to where i am. My grandfather, jacob, he was born in 1877. He was he was born on a farm about the size of this podium here. In line city ohio which is not the city and didnt even have any lime. He was one of ten kids. Crap was one of ten kids who grew up in a oneroom unpainted check. I have a photograph of them lined up by age staring at the photographer amazed to see someone in shoes. My greatgrandfather barney was a woodcutter in the midwest where there are no trees. Unemployed quite a lot. Also drunk, also illiterate. Ive got a copy of his marriage certificate with his ex right there. His only consummate aside from the ten prices that he would prices he went on a corn shucks stuffing, delete thing he accomplished was he trained a pair of old nags to haul him home dead drunk. He would fall out of the tavern, pass out in the horses would bring them home. That is what he accomplished in his life. Grandpa jake left home armed with a fifthgrade education heading for the bright lights of toledo, ohio. And he went to work as a buggy mechanic, a buggy mechanic, and then one day a horseless buggy pulled up at the shop and grandpa saw that and he saw the future. He fixed that, too, and it didnt take crap along to realize more money was to be made selling them. Also my uncle birthday and grandma and grandpa wedding anniversary were a little too close for comfort. So anyway he got in the car business and by the time that the came along in the 1940s we had a work you and grandpa and methodical arch own the dealership and my dads and younger brother randy used car lot and baby brother jack was a salesman, a cousin ran the Parts Department elderly aunts and girl cousins worked in office until the boy cousins in the all worked out on the car lot cleaning and boxing the cars. My cousin would go on to run the a while Party Association and i would go on to do whatever it is that i do in this book, write about cars and stuff. Even in these dark days for the american automobile there are times i wish id stayed in toledo and take it over that punitive agency because none of those latenight tv local car dealership ads, i got this whole idea of want to do hybrid hats Treasure Island buick. Come out with a parrot on my shoulder and one of those big cats, and eyepatch come on down to pirate patch where prices walk the plank. Dont miss our pieces of v8 usedcar lot for free chocolate doubloons for the kids. Been a great life. Grandpa died in 1960, honors from the rotary. But my family we are everything to the american car. Without the car we could read and have food and stuff. So our history begins with the beginning of the american car. And by now some of us have even gone to college. We didnt go far at college or do very well but we went. So i take the demise of the american car. I take this personally. Im looking around for somebody to blame. Im mad. I would when somebody like ralph nader. What fun it would be to jump on ralph nader with both feet and send the pink marcy asked marxist goose and he added his is cracked a kid. We should do the email ralph is 755 and clearly insane. But it took more than one man and is a good and ill written book unsafe at any speed direct the most important industry in the nation. That was the Corvair Ralph was attacking at unsafe at any speed, the corvair. Ralph was just wrong about the corvair because my High School Girlfriend had a corvair and connie was the worst driver in the world and one of the fastest. If connie couldnt get yourself killed in the corvair it couldnt be done. So ralph was all wrong. The pundits are are telling us that plenty of blame to go around for the death of the american car at a not sure about that either. Its true the car executives are knuckleheads but all executives are knuckleheads. Look at bill gates. If you are worth i got zillion dollars, wouldnt you go to a Barber College and get a decent five dollars haircut . Union labor leadership is maddening. Its one thing to be mad at them but its nothing to expect to be down at the uaw hall stand on the chair saying we demand less money from the bosses. This is not going to happen. Car workers make 600 an hour, or so im told. They get laid off every time a camel parts as an opec meeting. Maybe their pay is too high but like theyre getting that paid. So now i think to understand what doomed the american automobile we have to give up on economics and we have to turn to melodrama. Politicians, journalists, financial analysts, the purveyors of the banal, they been looking at cars as if a convertible or a business. Fire the nbas come higher a poet. The fake detroit is not a matter of financial crisis of foreign competition, corporate greed, union intransigence, energy costs or measuring the shoe size of the footprint in the carbon. A tragic romance, a tragic romance. Its about unreleased passion, lost love and wild horses, especially wild horses. Weve opened up our archives to look at other programs satirist p. J. Orourke, the author of 19 books. In 2010 he appeared at the get institute in washington, d. C. Where hes also a senior fellow to offer his thoughts on politicians and the federal government. I will not be satisfied until every seat in the house and senate is filled by a regular person, a regular person who quite reasonably hates being there. I want government to be like jury duty. And not jury duty for some exciting crime like the o. J. Simpson murder. I want government to be like jury duty for a long, boring, complex, confusing trial concerning tax law. Let me suggest indicting our federal tax code just for starts, which is nothing but fraud. I want government to be dull, dull and onerous responsibility attending a parentteacher conference, something that to be undertaken with weary reluctance because good citizenship requires it. I want every congressman, every senator, every president , every Supreme Court justice to be wishing, longing, begging to go back to his or her real job, real life. I want them hoping and pleading to be allowed to return to the private interests and personal applications. I want them using to be sitting in front of the tv with a beer watching ed crane lose money on his world series bats. Of what our elected officials to say that they intend to spend more time with their families and mean it, meaning it. We will know when we have won an election. We will know when we have won an election when every single candidate who is voted into Office Begins his or her victory speech by saying oh, shit. Now, im working on, in this new book, on the new theory of Political Science and instead of basing my theory on the work of deep political thinkers such as john locke and tom paine, John Stuart Mill and ed crane, im basing my theory on a dumb game played at allnight giggle sessions in girls boarding schools. My wife told me about this. The game is called jules krug mary. What happens is the girls picked three men and they go around the room and every girl have to decide which one of the three she would kill, which when she would screw and which one she would settle down for life embrace the family. I think the example my wife gave when she was telling about this was i think for example, was conan obrien, David Letterman and jay leno. The girls could you like nbc did, kill conan and screw letterman, all the other interns did, and mary j jay leno. Im laughing but then it struck me, kill, screw, marry thats politics, thats within the president of the United States. Take example 1992 president ial election george h. W. Bush, bill clinton, ross perot. We killed ross perot. Hardly avoid unscrewed from bill clinton and we marry kindly old george h. W. Bush. The outcome of the game is not always a foregone conclusion. What is our mysterious woe with bill instead the walk an hour with george. The 2000 president ial election america was divided about whether to screw george w. Orr gets screwed by al gore to think we all agreed on killing ralph nader. I wont venture in examples from more recent elections for fear of attracting attention from the secret service, hard as that sometimes seems to be in the obama white house, but anyway, kill, screw, marry, its got me thinking. The game works on the parts of government. You kill the postal service, get in bed with fema has a, marry the armed forces. Screw agricultural subsidies, marry Social Security and Health Care Reform kills us. I mean kill, screw, marry. Its a great tool of political analysis because in a free and democratic country politics as a sort of a three like at stool. Its a balance upon a tripod of power, freedom and responsibility, kill, screw, marry. We live in a free and democratic country, less democratic than it was before last night which is fine with me. Also kill, screw, marry is great tool of political analysis because we are so passionate about our politics and how to passion affairs in the . In a passion usually come in a crime of passion sometimes and occasionally they turn into stable permanent legal arrangements which is to say the endless peevish quarrel known as marriage. So how do we approach the Political Institutions of a free and democratic country. Do we overthrow them with violence . Do we screw around cheating on them while they score a run cheating on us or do we build something that is lasting and boring, worthy and annoying, marvelous virtues at the same time dreadfully stifling, a marriage. Power freedom responsibility kill, screw, marry. Now, when i first began to think about politics, when mastodons and nixon roamed the earth, i was obsessed with the freedom, with the screw part of kill, screw, marry. I had a messy idea of freedom back in those days, drinking bong water, but i had a tidy idea that freedom was the central issue of politics. I loved politics. Many young people do. Kids can spot a means of gaining without merit. This may be the reason that professional politicians retain a certain youthful zest. Ted kennedy was the boil right down to his last aged disease racked moment. I was wrong about the lovable nature of politics but i was sure i was right about the preeminent place freedom should have any political system. But there are lots of definitions of free. 36 definitions of free in websters Third International dictionary. Plenty of people are theoretically in favor of freedom. We are all but overrun with theoretical allies. We have got collaborators in the fight for freedom that we dont even want. They have nothing to lose but their change. The second to last sentence of the communist manifesto and theres a creepy echo of it in the refrain of Kris Kristofferson me and bobby mcgee. Mao announce letting 100 flowers boston. Half 1 Million People died in the definition of freedom. We should probably keep in mind that the original definition of the word free in english is not in bondage. The most meaningful thing about freedom is that meant and as a history of slavery. Here in america we have freedom because we have rights. The same way we can get mixed up about freedom, we can get mixed up about our rights. There are two kinds of rights, clinical scientists call the positive rights and negative rights. Sometimes we call them opportunities and privileges. I call them get out of here rights and give me rights. Politicians are always telling us about our give me rights especially a politician we have in the white house right now. As in the recent healthcare insurance. Our bill of rights doesnt mention any give me rights. Our bill of rights is all about our freedom to say i have got god, guns, and a big mouth and if the jury finds me guilty the judge will throw my bail. This is a get out of your right. Our right to be left alone, our freedom from interference use from government but also from our fellow citizens with what is to sober up, quickly, put the gun down and go back in the trailer. Politicians dont like they only like jimmy rights. They do not like get out of here rights. They dont like get out of here rights because one thing all legislative of being invited to get out of here and for another thing strict adherence to get out of here rights would leave little scope for legislation come something that legislators dearly love to do. Gimme rights much more politically alluring and this is how we find ourselves tempted with the right to education, the right to housing, right to a living wage, to oil spill beach clear, highspeed internet access, three french hens, two turtle doves and a partridge in a pear tree. Politicians show no signs of even knowing the difference between get out of here and gimme rights. And lighted a thousand anything makes them popular they honestly may not be able to tell. But there is evidence that the confusion about these rights was originally presented to the public malice of forethought. President Franklin Roosevelts four freedoms appeared to be at first glance as natural as well matched as heidi a composition as those Norman Rockwell illustrations for them. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, freedom from fear. But notice how the beggar, number three, freedom from want, has slipped in among the more respectable members of the freedom family. Want what, we ask . Saying as roosevelt did that we look forward to a world founded upon four essential freedoms and one is the freedom from want, this is not an expression of generosity. Declarations like freedom from want are never generosity. There were 6 million jews in europe who wanted nothing but a safe place to go, and where was roosevelt there . When rights consist of special privileges and positive benefits, rights killed freedom. All rights are the source of abusive political power. Its years before i realized this come years after i first got interested in politics before i realized the central issue of politics is power, not freedom. Kill, not screw. Only an idiot would not have seen this and i was one. I wasnt alone. Liberals, moderates, even some conservatives considered the sweeping gimme rights created by have the central social welfare programs to be extensions of freedom, and the opportunity right since. People were being given deputy to not starve to death. Thats not a purely evil way of looking at things. And not all the social welfare programs were bad, but the electorate, the candidates and me failed to properly scrutinize social welfare programs. Its not that we failed to examine whether the programs were needed for undated or well or poorly run. What we failed to look at was the enormous power being taken from people and get into politics. We let freedom be turned into power. F f off and die, the politicians told us. Politicians are careless about promising ginny rights. They are cynical about delivering them. And ginny rights in turn are absurdly expandable. The government gives me the right to get married. This indicates i have right to a good marriage otherwise why bother getting that right to me. My marriage is made a lot better by my childrens right to daycare so the brats are not in my face all day. Be deprived of the right to a nurturing development environment. Every child has the right to a happy childhood so i have the right to happy children. Richard children are happier. Give me some of Angelina Jolie is. The expense of all these rights makes politicians happy if they get to do the spending. They even get out of your rights are not free. They entail a military, a judiciary and a considerable expenditure patients by our neighbors when you want us to sober up and put the gun down and go back into the trailer. But gimme rights require no end of money and money is the least of the rights. Every one of such rights means the transfer of goods and services from one group of citizens to another. The first group of citizens loses those goods and services but all citizens lose the power that must be given to a Political Authority to enforce that transfer. We didnt. We didnt want to understand that power. This is equally true of people my age, of the baby boom. It was obviously in the way we reacted when politicians attempted to use the power to limit our freedom by drafting us into the war in vietnam. We fought the establishment by growing our hair long and dressing like circus clowns. A pathetic bunch. You are watching booktv on cspan2 and were taking a look at author programs with political satirist p. J. Orourke, a former editor chief of national lampoon. In 2014 he offered a critique of the baby boom generation as as one of the over 70 million boomers and reflected on his relationships with his parents and children. We are the generation that changed everything. Of all the errors and ethics of americans, ours is the one that made the biggest impression on ourselves. But thats an important accomplishment because we are the generation that created the self, made the firmament of the southcom divided the light of the self from the darkness of the self and said let there be self. If you were born between 19461964 you may have noticed this yourself. This is not to say we are selfish generation. Selfish means to concerned with the self, and were not. Self isnt something we are just concerned with. We are self. Before self, before us was void with our parents and dumpy clothes. Then we came along i now the personal is political, the social economic, the religious and the secular, the science and the arts. The personal is everything that creeps upon the earth after his and her kind. The baby boom has done one thing it is to beget a personal universe and our apologies for anyone who happens to personally be a jerk. Self is kind of like fish preferably speaking. You give a man a fish and youre fighting for david teach a man to fish and if he turns into a drive like a catch and release angling fanatic, deliver icy Water Testing crop with his threepound test line with the thousand dollar graphite rod, though, least its like partners led to have an out of the house. So here we are in the baby boom cosmos formed in our image, personally tailored to our individual needs and predetermined to be eternally fresh and novel, and we saw that it was good, or pretty good anyway. We shouldve had a cooler name. Where are the lost generation. Except good luck to anyone who tells us to get lost. Its too late now, were stuck with being described as exploding. Maybe its time now that weve splattered ourselves all over the place for the baby boom to look back and think what made us who we are and what caused us to act the way we do and what the the truth is if we hadnt been decidedly young for ever we would be old. [applause] youngest baby boomer was born in the last year when anybody thought it was hip to like lyndon johnson. Our they are turning 50 and we would be sad that getting old if we were not busy remarrying gender wise and reviving careers that hit glass ceilings when the children arrived and renewing prescriptions for drugs that keep us from being sad. We will never retire. We cant. The mortgages underwater. We are in debt up to the row gains with the kids college education, and it serves us right because with the generation who insisted that a passion for living should replace working for one. Still, its an appropriate moment for us to weigh what we have brought and tallied what weve added you and subtracted from existence. We reached the age of accountability, the world is our fault. We are the generation that has an excuse for everything. One of her greatest contributions to modern life. But the world is still our fault. Its just a matter of power and privilege. Whenever anything happens anywhere, somebody over 50 signed the bill for it. And the baby boom seated as we are at the head of life table is hitting generation x, generation y and the millennials all say check, please. Wonderful. [applause] i actually, i also chose another just a couple of paragraphs to ask p. J. Three. Do you need your reading glasses . Yes. This is near the end end ofe book. Its a bit of a summing up and so you can see sort of where p. J. Lands with this. What is turn the page. Got it. Thank you. And yet we are the best generation in history which goes to show history stinks. But at least where five euros by historical standards. The baby boom, baby boomer was a carefully conducted scientific experiment. The empirical results are posted to take the biggest generation in the most important country and you put them all into excessively happy families, given too much affection, extravagant friends, plenty of money, a profusion of opportunity and a collapse of traditional social standards. And you get better people. Well, not better really. Take it one by one we are as smart and as vile as a cane, the way people always have been but we are better behaved of a better behaved isnt threat we do put either. Woeful, counts, rash, indulge, entitled by you know, we are still swell. Love that, thank you. [applause] so this book has ever interesting structure. The chapters are essay length and you blend in some real memoir stuff about your life, along with a lot of broader thinking about baby boomers and how we got this way. You start, as we all know i think the baby boom started in 1946, lasted the last year of the baby boom was 1964. So you were born sort of on one end of the spectrum. I on the other, although it is defining characteristic of baby boomers that we all look the same age. Yes. About 18 by my rough estimation. But you described the baby boom experience as seniors how purpa, high school, changes, jews, sophomores and freshmen. Youre in the senior class. I am in the senior class, me, cher, hillary and bill clinton, cheech. My speech to the scenes, we were at the bow wave of this voyage of exploration that would be the baby boom were also tethered closely behind our parents, the greatest generation. Thank you all, we got dragged under the vote. If you want up a little soggy as a sort of Financial Advisors with tongue studs and trotskyites trying to start tea party protest. We are to be forgiven. But your senior class was really on the vanguard of so many things, including vietnam and drug taking and sex. By the time the freshman class came along, i think, in my case, im the youngest of four. I watched my three older siblings do all of these things and it scared me witless and i did none of those things. If this its as if i group into 50. Young baby boomers are more cautious or as a put in the book, i mean they embrace sex, drugs and rock n roll in the deep philosophical underpinnings of their of. But they had seen this in action. It seemed older baby boomers in action and the new what works in general doesnt always work when the bong sets fire to the beanbag chair. The baby boom gets better behaved as it goes along. And actually one delightful aspect of this book is that you start by describing what sounds like a very, very early memory in your toledo, ohio, where you are watching the world of the picture window of your brandnew, your families brandnew house. Im standing there in the wind is come up to my chin, too young to go to school and watching the big kids go to school so it is one of my for early memories. This was the silent generation. They were not silent out there. There were yelling and screami. It just seemed like, you know, i say at this moment in the book that all generations of kids have wanted to be grownups, except us. We wanted to be bigger kids. That is about we kind of cap. You make an observation about childhood that really struck me. You say children of baby boomer children were in control of their own childhood. Our parents worked as children. Our children worked like maniacs, and yet we were a generation, are the a generatif people had childhoods. Its like get out of the house. When we get out of the house. Its a beautiful day. Its raining, its 30. They said it was a beautiful day, get out of the house. Ive never quite figured out the parenting style. We take a lot of grief from the helicopter parents our parents, they were strange. They could be like so cautious and so fearful of things, like dont get to know people who are not from europe. That would be scary. And yet on the other hand, they would like fourth of july come around and dad would hand out the mad these m80s. Everybody has the uncle, my uncle mikey mike. He would give us, no, this was more respectable uncle, my businessman uncle who did this. He would give us the firecrackers at his cottage at the lake to blow on the fourth of july and give us each a lit cigarette. Those were the days. Not to smoke because but because that was the safeway to light firecrackers. Start to fiddle with matches we might hurt ourselves. That of course they drank. It was like they were real strict all day long until about 6 30. I know im only ten but can i take the car . Sure. What the in 2017 p. J. Orourke publish a book on the 2016 election entitled how the hell did this happen . In march of that you spoke at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco to provide his thoughts on President Trump and the reasons for his victory. Heres a portion. How could a person like donald trump possibly become president . Maybe its a matter of what the great political satirist h. L. Mencken said. He said democracy is the theory that the Common People know what they want and deserve to get it, good and hard. Or more likely its part of something larger. Because here in the United States we are not alone in having a political awkward moment. We seem to be in the midst of a global revolt against the political elites. The political elites who created the postworld war Ii International order and who for the past 70 years have been running everything, running everything into the ground as far as a lot of ordinary voters are concerned. Internationally we are seeing a rise in xenophobia, and jingoism and off their jainism. It ranges from the faintly, skeptical of the European Union and shambles to the deeply sinister activities of Vladimir Putin xi jinping. Taking measurements for a new iron curtain. You would think, you would think this would seem worse to ordinary voters than a mere standard issue political elitism of the jeb bush or Hillary Clinton but the political elites did in part create their own problem. Over the past four generations the homework of the political elites has been the expansion of political power. Political power is expand in size and expense. Onethird of the world gdp is now spent by the politicians in governments around the world. One out of every three things you make is grabbed by governments. If your cat has three kittens, one of them is a government agent. Political power has expanded in scope. Politics casts its net over every little aspect of life. Nothing is so private that it isnt tangled up in politics. Transgender bathrooms come we knew politics was crap and that we find it where we take what is a political issue. And i and i have to say to the political elites when you guys going to realize, guys and going to realize that politics is a twoway street. The elite politicians have spent for generations creating a powerful, huge, heavy, unstoppable, monster truck of a government, as in the same politicians get all shocked and weepy when a horrible politician whom they detest gets behind the wheel, turns the truck around and runs them over. We need to make the truck smaller, yanked the engine and install foot pedals. Make a government into a kiddie course of the worst that can happen is it bangs us in the shins. People all over the world are saying we are sick of the elites. We are tired of the experts, to hell with the deep thinkers who think they know what we should have better than we do, and who while there added are grabbing everything we have got. We see this revolt against the elites, for example, in the brexit vote. We sit in the rise of alternative Political Parties in europe, on both ends of the political spectrum, greens on the left and nationalists on the right. We can see it in brazil were almost every politician in the country, leftright or middle of the road has been charged with corruption for the simple reason that their guilty of it. In the case of brexit, britains political elite, its Business Elite and its trade union elite were all opposed to brexit, and thats to say that the people who supported the iraq war plus the people cause the 2008 Global Financial crisis, plus the people who nationalize the British Automobile industry were all in unprecedented agreement on one issue and the voters felt they couldnt go wrong voting against this trifecta. Latin american, there was a very similar case in colombia. They spent five years negotiating a peace treaty with the starving rabble of communist guerrillas had been marauding in the countries hinterland since 1964. A plebiscite was held to ratify that hes agreement causing their voters to ask, what, wht course after 52 years of murder, kidnapping, pillage, theft and trafficking in narcotics, the guerrillas are getting Retirement Benefits . Plebiscite failed. Even the dull politics of australia have been in turmoil. The politics and australia are so dole that the name of the conservative party is the liberal party. But australia has had five prime ministers in six years and his last election are resulted a hung parliament. Hung parliament, must have been attempting. I suppose its hanging legislators is immoral and probably illegal except in queensland at the parliamentarians are caught chasing sheep. Politics in canada, even more dole than the politics of australia and canada they have a premier was completely inexperienced dashing young celebrity named justin. I havent googled can dating politics because who would . But im assuming justin is justin bieber. And, of course, here in america obviously we saw the revolt against the elites and the ridiculous rise of donald trump. At that thing understand the desire to shake things up but why trump . Of all people. Well, trump may be a rich guy, maybe hes a of the 1 like like he says he is, but theres nothing easy about him, for sure. Nothing unique about the way he sounds. Sounds like the rest of us except he sounds at the rest of us after we have had drinks. He doesnt even drink. Hes a jerk. The guy is a jerk but you can imagine playing a round of golf with him. Cheats, but so do i. Imagine a round of golf with Hillary Clinton. Has 20 harvard graduate caddies of read all the books about golf but have never been on the links. They spent the whole match telling you, daughter, but you what club to use. The secret service is there to make sure you take her advisers suggestion that you get from the fairway with a sand wedge. After chip shot a cup and the penthouse, get moved closer to her lie, and an appropriate term to use in any game hillary is playing. And the scorecard mysteriously winds up on hillarys personal email server. On the other hand, i dont know if i could stand how long i would last playing a round of golf with donald trump before i gave into the temptation temptation to lack a titlist into the back of his head while he stand on the green nudging his ball with his foot to create an alternative fact about how close it is to the whole. But anyway, global revolt against the elites. In many ways its a little puzzling. I didnt really feel the power of this myself while i was reporting on this. In certain ways the beginning of the 21st century seems like an odd time to be having some sort of revolt against the elites especially in a country like ours where things are going at least fairly well. We are not in desperate financial straits. The Great Recession of 2008, that was painful and there was a certain amount of waking up on friends couches after somebody took the house but these dates back to everybody in america has had a divorce so we have been through that before. If there were any credit lines during the Great Recession they sure were not handing out lowcarb then the slim, americas obesity crisis abides. We are embroiled in a long war, more than 7000 american combatants have died during the 15 years of the war on terror but more than 7800 american combatants died at the battle of gettysburg. Streets are not filled with protesters against the war we are in now. Hippies are not sticking daisies in drones. We are culturally and politically polarized in america but not in a in a way that woud startle an oldschool history professor and jolt him away from his nap in the faculty lounge. They year 1861, i mean, that was polarized. Fort sumter isnt taking incoming at the moment as far as i know. And yet the American People are fearful and they blame their fears on the political elite. One of the reasons for this, important reason is because of political elites have a lousy job dealing with certain problems. The middle east, for example, demons have been unleashed in the middle east. Elites failed to address the problems that cause edema the unleashed. Elites seem to have been breeding payments and the titles of the elite diplomacy in the geopolitics and delete military strategy. And then those elites turn these demons loose in the middle east as if demons have ever been an endangered species in the region as it they were trying to reintroduce demons. One result has been murder all over the world. How much further away from the corals and hatreds of the middle east could a person get than to be at latin night and again nightclub in orlando, florida . Another result of course of this mishandling of the middle east is the refugee crisis in europe, and europeans are going what do the elites of care . The refugees are not crowding the stairways and the corridors and jostling the elites in the halls of European Parliament in brussels. The refugees are not building shantytowns on the Tennis Courts of the elites of the country clubs. Immigration means household staff, a new ethnic restaurants. Elites dont seem to be able to see any similarity between the wall that donald trump has promised us and they gated communities in which the elites live. Another problem the elites have caused for themselves is they have promised that politics can fix everything. Well, when you promise that you can fix everything, then everything thats broken is your fault. If political elites say that politics can fix climate change, then i want to see bill clinton shoveling my driveway. I know, i know, he has heart, but thanks to Global Warming my driving on had a few inches of snow this winter. We are seeing in this global revolt against the elites is the elites ending up getting blamed for everything, whether or not it is their fault including getting blamed for the fact that we live in a time of rapid change. And never mind that much of the change is good change. A number of people worldwide living in extreme poverty, living on less than a dollar a day. That is been reduced by half since the year 2000, amazing marvelous project. And yet, and also despite some recent backsliding, theres been an overall growth in human liberty for the past 30 years, definitely since the 1989 fall of the berlin wall. To be fair to the elites, rapid change creates problems for them, too. Speedy transformation and social mores, economic norms and political givens confuses everybody, confuses everybody especially those who thought they were leaving the mores, norms and givens parade. Mankind no longer has to march in lockstep. People are becoming individual persons instead of masses on review. This is great but certain difficulties arise on the Parade Ground when the strife is broken, when the band breaks up they can leave the tube to be turned into a beer bong, the fellow with a bass drum sitting sitting on the curb playing a solo from inagodadavida, the trombonist using a slide to goose the cornet player and nobody left who can spell glockenspiel. Meanwhile the elite drum major is some dork standing in the middle of the street wearing a goofy hat and waving a stick. Swift improvements in transport, in communication, in technical, technical capabilities have combined to produce this thing we called globalization, international trade, shrinking the earth to a goodsized planet. Thats great sometimes. We love having the everything from everywhere brought right to our door, except when we dont, like we love going to Yellowstone Park but how much do we love having herds of bison, the guys come the trees, mountains, the trees and the bears all in our rec room . We will need to clean the carpet and we go to work in the morning and find out a eight hour job. The world is a smaller place now. Did this make the political elites think it would make the somalia world would make everyone that along x try it with your kids. Put them in a in a small placeh as the back seat of your car, now taken to see the world. Take them to Yellowstone Park from, say, new jersey. How are your kids getting along . I guess politically elites dont take family car trips. I guess little elites dont even fly economy class. Then there is a curse whatever it is going on with internet about which i would be the wrong person to ask. I finally got my space figured out only to discover the only person in my space is me. Incidentally, concerns the internet, whose bright idea was it to make sure that every idiot in the world is in communication with every other idiot . I take it on trust that the digital revolution will change everything, and for all i know its done so already. Didnt there used to be a bookstore next to hey, where did sears go . Im glad i can comparison shop for refrigerated online and by any brand that exist and have delivered the next day with free shipping. But the kenmore repairman at sears, like he is now enlisted as a foot soldier in americas opioid addiction attack and how to get my refrigerator into the ups dropbox icemaker quits working . All change is disrupted. All change is scary. Changing a diaper, change of life, any change in the order. Friday people asking for spare change on the street. Got a little of that here. When contemporary social and economic change our combined with contemporary distrust of politically elites, a distrust that in some cases has been earned, the results can be very disturbing. Russias ugly new nationalism comes from Vladimir Putin harnessing popular outrage at the incompetent kleptomaniac lyrically elites who took possession of russia after xi jinping, makes use of the popular anger, all the tea in china scale of corruption among chinese elites. Indeed, there are antielite elite aspects to fanatical interpretation of jihad. Isis karas, they hate elites so much that they have suicide squads of elites poke around killing themselves. Modern world is a scary world and fear is a bad schoolmarm and we have got a at the blackboard, and how can people in the democratic countries learn even the one plus one fundamentals of democracy and all they can think of is teacher is slimy and skill and his tentacles of its head. What happens is the pupils in the class turned for help to the big, stupid bully at the back of the classroom, and that donald trump. Our look at satirist p. J. Orourke programs continue with a discussion of his most recent book, none of my business which looks in the history of currency and his thoughts on finance. One reason that the concept of money so often violates common sense is that governments do so many nonsensical things. Trust, but verify, the only president that professed some libertarian. Its a free market at least in europe. Paper money was made privately itali italian merchants and gold pieces. But it didnt take long for the governments to steal the idea. And government fiduciary money was printed in sweden. It came in the form of copper plates. Thus in swede and large fortune was a large fortune. In 1556, they began issuing more paper notes and the bank issued too many notes and the swedish government went broke. In 1716, scottsman john law helped the french government establish the bank royale issuing notes by the Land Holdings west of the mississippi and bank royale issued too many notes, the french government went broke. Most extensive pre modern experiment with fiduciary money happened here in america in 1775, the Second Continental Congress not only created paper money, but passed a law against refusing to accept it. Continental congress issued too many notes and a pattern begins to emerge. All fiduciary money is backed by a commodity even if the backers are lying about the amount of that commodity. Now, historically the most common commodity has been gold. By the 19th century the major currencies of the world were based on gold led by the most of currencies which is the british pound. This is monetary stability and great economic growth. Some people think we should go back on the Gold Standard and not all of them live in armed compounds in idaho. Money should be worth something. And gold seems as good as whatever. But the high value of golds a social convention, its a habit left over from the days when bright, unblemished things, and people included, were rare. Gold may go out of fashion and a generation may record gold is gross and immoral the way at that millennials regard veal. [laughter]. And gold is a product and we may get huge new amounts of it. The this happened to the spanish, when they came to the new world and had huge amounts of gold and melted it down and it never occurred to the spanish that they were creating more gold and nothing to buy with it. And presented by the vast wealth of americas oceans, fields, forests, spain took the gold. Its as if somebody robbed a bank and only took the deposit slips. Real problem with fiduciary money from a government standpoint is not that its e. R. Rational, but that its inconvenient. The currency that can be converted into a commodity limits the amount of currency that can be presented. The government has to have at least some of that commodity or the world makes a laughingstock out of its bank notes, not worth the continental. With fiduciary money, Governments Lie about having the pressure metals to redeem their Paper Currency and the governments do worse than lie. People holding fiduciary money can take up the way they did on april 5th, 1933 when fda signed the executive order 6102, banning the ownership of gold. People can wake up and find out that redeeming paper kinsey for what the law says its worth is against the law. So, if the government can lie and steal to support its currency, why cant a Government Lie about and steal everything, everything to do with its currency . And thats exactly what all governments have done. Instead of passing a law saying one dollar equals x amount of gold. Our government passed a law saying 1 equality 1. This is fiat money and meaning for the italian cheap and not reliable car. Fiat money is backed by nothing that faith that a government wont keep printing money until were using it in place of something much more important, such as toilet paper, which is where things have come to in venezuela. Its not just the venezuela boulevard. No Intrinsic Value is in any fiat money. Its a pronounce of existentialism by Central Government banks. Trillions and trillions of dollars, euros, pounds, yen and ranimby. Theyre singing, were here because were here because were here and during world war i when the fiat money came into use. The fiat inmo because the department of the says weve got it. Its supposed to be worth something for what i call the lousy parent reason. Frustrated and inept governor and like we frustrated and inept parents tell our children, because i said so. So is cryptocurrency the answer . Now, thats one of those, im glad you asked that question questions. As poll tilliniticians Running Office say, i have no idea what the answer is. As a libertarian i want a medium of exchange, money that adheres to libertarian principles. Money that adheres to just one libertarian principle would suffice and this is the privacy principle. What i do that does not physically harm anyone else is none of none elses business, period. Now, business is conducted with money. Cryptocurrency would seem to be the private kind of mon libertarians want. Because its private in the two most important senses of privacy. First cryptocurrency is not public. And therefore, it is not subject to government Public Policy. And government Public Policy with money is the issue as much as the government feels like issuing. The government treats money like a stalker treats posting things on your facebook page. A couple of clicks of the Federal Reserve keyboard theres another creepy rant and the original rant didnt have much value and subsequent rants are worrying. Unfriending the government, very difficult to do. Second, cryptocurrency encrypts transactions so what youre buying or selling is not revealed to a nosey snoop and that nosey snoop being once again the government. Im a fairly law abiding guy. Ill wait for the walk son on an empty Street Corner in the middle of the night. I dont even cheat on my taxes any more than federally mandated tax loopholes require me to do. I wouldnt use cryptocurrency for any illegal scheme well, maybe cuban cigars. I dont like the private purchases being on the Public Record in sales seats and credit records and who knows what nosey snoop government agencies. And i dont like other peoples purchases on the record either. If someone buys a plastic at atomically correct inflatable doll, i dont want to know about it. Maybe a high minded epa functional would notify peta and the mouse doll would be there within paint tossing region. Im much more worried about the government abusing police power than individuals abusing power. And cryptocurrency, i dont own in i. I have no use for cryptocurrency. The price for one bitcoin is down this morning, i checked hovering around 7,000. Okay . But if you wanted to buy ive got a banged up old volvo station wagon, i got for my teenage kids to bang up more. If you offered me one bitcoin for that volvo station wagon, ill tell you to bite me. Im confused about the computer programs block chains that j und underlie cryptocurrency. Im confused by cryptocurrency. And confused by a lot of things. And by the airplane how they take off and land and the internet, i think whose bright idea to make sure that every idiot in the world is in touch with every other idiot. [laughter] and theyre connected by a small Computer Network and i fear, i fear that somehow cryptocurrency is the intention of outlaw nerds with weaponized slide rules and high school evil math club, you know. Right now, some dateless pearshaped 15yearold with a pear shape is in his bedroom logging on to make himself a billionaire on the dark net. I hope that walgreens accept cryptocurrency in payment for acne cream. Money is the root of libertarianism and anybody confused by money is exchange. And the cryptocurrency, probably not the antipsychotic that is needed. We worry about money, about our medium of exchange. That if our medium of exchange collapses that our society will collapse. Back a number of years ago, ive thought about this and i thought maybe the way to understand that worry about society collapsing is to go someplace where society has collapsed already. Back in 1992, i went to somalia to cover the usled military mission there to save somalia. Notionally from famine and actually from total anarchy and let me pause for moment and talk about the anarchy. We libertarians are often confused with or accused of being anarchists and this isnt true. Libertarians believe in social structure. We believe in the social structure that protects individual liberty and ensures responsibilities. This is different from believing in no social structure at all and somalia had no social structure at all. Somalia was true anarchy. A vicious dictatorship had been overthrown and the somali ended up shooting at each other. It wasnt traditional african tribal warfare because the somalis, belonged to the same tribe, but the tribe has six clans and hundreds of subclans and each is divided into murderous feuds. They fought each other with rifles, machine guns and by the look of mogadishu, with filth. In the city everything had been built with concrete and it had been blasted back to rebar and cement. There was no lights or electricity and everything was snatched for firewood. Sewage weld up through the pavement, what pavement there was left. Rubbish adop wreckage and goats grazed on the offal. And everything accomplished in mogadishu. I signed on as a radio reporter with abc news and abc news found a mansion that was protected. And they hired mercenaries to protect the compound. And we were housed in the compound and bedded down in shifts while our security as the somali mercenaries liked to be called were encamped. It was impossible to go out without the security and even with the gunman along there were people coming up, hands tugged at wallet pockets and chris bands. A they were grasping, pushing, whining, sneer people and young men waving ak47 assault rifles pushed among the ground. Rusted pickup trucks with gun mounts welded into the bed. There was another abc reporter, ill call him leon. He offered to take me to the market in mogadishu. I said, sure, i wanted to see if there was a market in mogadishu. If there was a market, what were they selling . Goats on offal, turns out. I learned about the medium of exchange in the market in mogadishu. I learned that there will always be a medium of exchange. Now, the currency may not be what you expect, but no matter how totally society collapses, there will be a form of currency. So were travelling with an armed somali driver and translator and this requisite truck full of armed security. But even so when we get down to the market. My friend leon gets out of the car and he pulls out a. 9 millimeter glock pistol and he kind of waves it over his head in a dramatic gesture and racks a bullet into the chamber and im looking at him and leon looks at me grinning like a maniac. I call it the visa card of the future. [laughter] now, if you missed any of these author programs with satirist, p. J. Orourke or in their entirety. Visit foxbusiness. Com. Access our orcaves using the search box at the top of the page and search p. J. Orourke. Youre watching book tv on cspan2 with the latest n nonfiction books and authors. Its created as a Public Service and brought to you today by your television provider. Coming up on cspan2s book tv. A look at body image and writing style. And her book of essays is wow, no thank you. And Douglas Murray associate editor talks about brexit wars and impact of covid19 on the u. K. And later, economic and equality on the United States