The CEO of the Sofa (O'Rourke, P. J.)

by P. J. O'Rourke

  Open Letter to Democrats

  I suggest that you members of “the party of Jefferson” do something that Jefferson would have done—I don’t mean make like William Jefferson Clinton with Sally Hemings—and stop and think for a minute. Why are you a Democrat? Are you a Democrat because you’re poor? Poor people vote for Democrats. Rich people vote for Republicans. Do you think the bigwigs in the Democratic Party don’t know this? When was the last time Al Gore called you with a hot tip on Occidental Petroleum stock?

  Are you a Democrat because you’re a union member? Then why, after eight years of Bill Clinton, did some Chinese guy in Guangdong province have your job? Plus, it’s the same with the union high muckety-mucks as it is with the Democratic Party pooh-bahs. Notice it’s called “organized labor,” not “organized you’re-the-boss.” Have you ever heard your union president say, “Look at the loot we’ve got in our pension fund and all the swell rackets we’re in on with the mob guys—let’s just effin’ buy General Motors?”

  Are you a Democrat because you’re a woman? Then how come you’re married to a Republican? Most women are. Face it, you were afraid that a two-Democrat family might cause the kids to grow up to be liberals—forty years old, still wearing nostril rings and living at home, clomping around the house in Doc Martens with no job yet except volunteer work on Nader presidential campaigns.

  Are you a Democrat because you’re gay? Come on, do you really think Republicans hate gays? You’ve been to Republican homes. Do they look like they were decorated by the Christian Coalition? What are interior design firms going to do with Democrats, go rearrange their bowling trophies? Who appreciates Karl Lagerfeld, Nancy Reagan, or Barney Frank? What kind of ballet does the UAW sponsor? Imagine La Scala sung by Snoop Dogg.

  Are you a Democrat because you’re part of a minority group? Forget about it. Mexicans, Blacks, Jews, Italians, Irish, Puerto Ricans—you guys hate each other. Become Republican and at least you’ll be allowed to admit it—after three drinks. “Wall Street? I’ll tell you what’s wrong with Wall Street. Ever since that sonofabitch Joe Kennedy, the goddamned shanty Irish have been running Wall Street. Say, Patrick, another G and T and make it snappy. Hey, what’s in this? Arrrrrgh!” (Drops dead.) Although even Republicans have to watch their mouths sometimes.

  Anyway, don’t be fooled by affirmative action. It’s just another trick the Democratic Party uses to keep you poor even after you get a law and a medical degree. Affirmative action makes employers think, “Black woman nuclear physicist? Hah! Probably let her into Harvard ’cause they were looking for a twofer. Bet she got Cs in high school practical math. Give her a job in personnel.” Meanwhile, the same guy is thinking, “Whoa, male, Japanese, and Jewish—he must have been really good to get into chiropractor school.”

  You see, it’s actually Republicans who favor racial and ethnic diversity. Just look at the people who are cleaning Republican houses, mowing Republican lawns, cooking Republican meals, and caring for Republican children—black, brown, yellow, you-name-it. And every single one of these people is in this country illegally. I mention that in case you are a Democrat because you’re a criminal. You’d be a lot better off as a Republican. Republicans know crime. Would you rather swindle corporate shareholders out of billions or knock over a convenience store?

  What Americans don’t understand about Republicans, and what causes a lot of Americans to continue to be Democrats, is that Republicans don’t want anybody to become Republican. This is because it’s already hell getting a tee time. And that’s why Republicans insult gays, attack feminists (like Sandra Day O’Connor is a Stepford Wife), support Confederate flag flying (as if Robert E. Lee voted for Lincoln), make bigoted remarks, threaten everybody with “law and order,” and pretend to love born-again religious ding-dongs. It’s to put you off. It’s so Republicans can take five hours to play a doubles match while half in the bag from afternoon gin rickeys without some parvenu former Democrat coming up and saying, “Vernon Jordan and I reserved this court.”

  But I’ll tell you a little secret. If you want to join the Republican Party, we have to let you in. There’s nothing we can do about it. I mean, if we’ll take Al D’Amato, we’ll take anybody.

  Being as I’m such a better person, said the Political Nut, I’m also going to do something nice for Republicans. You know what Republicans need? Excuses. Republicans are always short on excuses for who they are and what they do. So I’ve drawn up a list of excuses for Republicans. It can be printed on a handy three-by-five card and carried in a suit pocket or slipped in a golf bag.’

  Taking the Fifth

  I. FIVE EXCUSES FOR REPUBLICAN CIGAR SMOKING

  I can identify my clothes by smell. That way, when I’m getting dressed in the dark, I don’t accidentally wind up in a Norma Kamali skirt and a pair of Joan & David lizard pumps.

  Cigars produce more secondary smoke. Thus antismoking types are killed off faster.

  I’d feel like a jerk serving brandy and Freedent.

  Tell the following anecdote: Years ago I was on the porch of a little inn on the coast of Maine. An old lady was sitting in a rocker. I asked would she mind if I smoked a cigar. “Young man,” she said, “when I was a little girl my mother told me never to object when a man lights a cigar. ‘Where there are cigars,’ said my mother, ‘there’s money.’”

  Cigars are the way I relax and unwind. They’re better for my health than drinking.

  II. FIVE EXCUSES FOR REPUBLICAN DRINKING

  If I stopped drinking and smoking, it would add ten years to my life. But it would add them to the wrong end.

  “I was drunk” is a better excuse than “I was stupid.”

  Weddings, funerals, divorces, hostile takeovers, bankruptcies, tax audits, drops in the NASDAQ, weekends with the family—I’m an occasional drinker.

  When you’ve been through as many weddings, funerals, divorces, hostile takeovers, bankruptcies, tax audits, drops in the NASDAQ, and weekends with the family as I have, you’ve got some memories you’d like to lose. Drinking causes memory loss.

  There’s another excuse, but I forget it.

  III. FIVE EXCUSES FOR REPUBLICANS DRIVING SPORTS CARS THAT COST MORE THAN THEIR FATHERS EVER MADE IN A YEAR

  A high-powered executive in a high-pressure job may not have time to sail his yacht or fly his plane, but driving a fine performance vehicle is a way for him to relax and unwind twice a day just going back and forth to work. (The president of Porsche once actually said this in an interview. Claim he said it to you.)

  When I was in high school I promised myself that someday I would get one of these babies. Lots of people abandon their youthful ideals.

  When a thing gives you honest unalloyed pleasure, you can’t think of it in terms of monetary expense.

  It’s really an investment.

  Anyway, it’s cheaper than marrying a woman half my age.

  IV. FIVE EXCUSES FOR REPUBLICANS MARRYING WOMEN HALF THEIR AGE

  Because I can.

  She loves me for my money—and that’s true love.

  She believes my stories about the sixties.

  If she tries to screw me in the divorce, I’ll fire her dad.

  She’s mellow. She’s laid-back. She doesn’t care if I smoke, drink, drive like hell, and stay out all night.

  V. FIVE EXCUSES FOR EVERYTHING ELSE REPUBLICAN

  My wife won’t let me.

  I’m in the middle of a terrible divorce.

  After I gave up smoking and drinking and sold the Porsche and quit running around with women half my age, I had to do something.

  One thing I’ve learned in all my years of experience—never make excuses.

  I used to be a Democrat.

  An integral aspect, I remarked to my wife, of Hegel’s philosophy is don’t put jelly beans up your nose!

  “It’s difficult to have a serious conversation with a toddler in the room,” my wife said, handing Muffin over to the teenage baby-sitter.

  “Anything interesting
in the Sunday Times?”

  The Japanese, I said, want sumo figure skating to be a demonstration sport at the Salt Lake City Olympics. The Tampa Bay Devil Rays have traded for a fellow who’s been rookie of the year nine times. And Oprah is starting a professional Women’s Emotions League with teams in six cities. There’s an exhibit of Republican folk art at the Met—wrist corsages, hand-knit mittens for golf club heads, and a rare Philadelphia Main Line needlepoint throw pillow stitched with the motto A FOOL AND HER MONEY ARE SOON MARRIED. The magazine has a story about a human child, abandoned at birth, who was raised to adulthood by New Yorkers. Someone has genetically engineered an oak tree with foliage that resembles McDonald’s cheeseburger wrappers so that, in the autumn, falling leaves will blend with the environment. A California gynecologist is offering drive-through pap tests. An international tribunal is being established in The Hague to conduct Peace Crime Trials, prosecuting people who committed capitalist atrocities between 1945 and 1989. Vermont will experiment with low-sodium driveway salt this winter. And a Million Girlfriend march on Washington is being planned, which will focus on the issue of—

  “Commitment,” said my wife.

  “What is man’s place in the universe?” I heard the baby-sitter ask Muffin. They seemed to be playing some kind of board game.

  “Um, I dunno,” said Muffin.

  “Okay,” said the baby-sitter, taking another card from the top of a stack. “If God is just, why does evil exist in the world?”

  “Um, I dunno,” said Muffin.

  What are you two doing? I asked.

  “We’re playing Significant Pursuit,” said the baby-sitter. “My mother invented it. Muffin’s doing really well. She said that if a tree falls in a forest and nobody’s there, everybody will hear about it if it falls on Pooh and kills him.”

  “That game might be a little old for Muffin,” said my wife.

  I’m feeling a little old myself, I said. There’s an article in the Book Review—do you realize it’s been thirty years since Hunter Thompson wrote Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas? Seems like yesterday.

  “I’m sure it does,” said my wife. “You can’t remember anything about yesterday, either.”

  Well, I said, not much happened yesterday. But, then again, not much happens in Fear and Loathing. That’s the truly amazing thing about the book. Here is a famously colorful era’s finest specimen of the picaresque—a genre that, according to William Rose Benét, “deals sympathetically with the adventures of clever and amusing rogues”—and what gives? The rogues aren’t clever. Amusing is not the word for them. They accomplish little roguery. The author shows them no sympathy. And of adventures they really have none. Two men in early middle age visit Las Vegas while intoxicated. They frighten a few people (mostly each other), are rude to bystanders, and astonish a cleaning lady. Two rental cars and several bedrooms and bathrooms are left the worse for wear. A couple of large corporations are cheated of modest sums. As for serious malefaction, there is possession of controlled substances, a (poorly) concealed weapon, possible sexual contact with a woman who may be underage, and a skipped hotel bill. In a century marked by countless unspeakable crimes, we may speak of these, and they don’t count.

  Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a bloodcurdling adventure where no one is murdered, robbed, imprisoned, or hanged. The only hair’s-breadth escape is from a speeding ticket and DWI citation. And at the end of the story comes, not triumph or tragedy or revenge or contrition, but status quo ante like a TV sitcom. But Hunter is such a genius that it’s a thrilling saga. A thrilling saga in which nothing much happens—a fitting example of the picaresque for the Now Generation. One of the things Hunter did in this book was write a coda to, an obituary for, the nonsense of the 1960s. It’s important to recall that in the 1960s nothing much happened.

  “Could be,” said my wife. “I was in preschool.”

  Well, the war in Vietnam was widely and vigorously protested, I said. And nothing happened, the war went on. Blacks rioted in the slums. Nothing happened, the slums are still there. Mysticism was practiced, psychedelics were ingested, consciousness was everywhere raised. Nothing happened. Hundreds of thousands of people gathered at Woodstock. Nothing whatsoever happened. And we were all freed from sexual prudery and repression. And nothing happened—at least nothing very splendid, though there were plenty of illegitimate children, venereal diseases, and hurt feelings.

  We see the protagonists of Fear and Loathing in 1971, in the wake of this great generational blow-off, wallowing in the inanity of the times. It would be a masterly period piece if Hunter had decided to go no further. But Hunter is nothing if not a gone cat. Instead, the book is an entire description of all life as complete senseless idiocy.

  Good and evil are a ridiculous mess. We hear much about the “vicious,” “twisted” “swine” who control American society and who threaten Raoul Duke and his three-hundred-pound Samoan attorney. But the only people we see being vicious or twisted or swinish are that attorney and Duke. Authority is described as nasty and corrupt. And nearly all the ancillary characters in the book, even the hotel clerks, are portrayed as authority figures. Yet these people are largely honest, forbearing, even hospitable. “Let’s have lunch!” says one hotel clerk as Raoul Duke absconds.

  Threats are, indeed, made to Duke and the attorney, but only by innocents such as the carload of Oklahoma tourists who’ve had “Shoot! Scag! Blood! Heroin! Rape! Cheap! Communists!” screamed at them. And when we encounter actual “pigs”—as Duke calls law officers—they turn out to be, at worst, bemused. “What the hell’s goin’ on in this country?” a small-town Georgia DA quite reasonably asks when Duke and the attorney tell him narcotics addicts are everywhere, working in pairs and slitting people’s throats. And when Duke is apprehended drunk, stoned, and driving at 120 mph, the California highway patrolman is downright kind. And has a sense of humor: “I get the feeling you could use a nap.”

  There is a terrific loneliness throughout the book. The protagonists are not friends. Duke shows occasional protective impulses toward the attorney. He forgoes an opportunity to electrocute him. The attorney threatens to carve a Z in Duke’s forehead. Duke locks the attorney in a bathroom. No explanation is given for these two being together. But neither mentions any other emotional bond. The only romance is when the attorney seduces a runaway who obsessively draws Barbra Streisand and has come to Las Vegas to present her portraits to the star. This, it hardly needs saying, comes to a bad end.

  Duke and the attorney profess no moral, religious, or philosophical principles. The attorney makes no statement of conscience except to call Duke a “filthy bastard” for proposing to prostitute the Barbra Streisand artist. And Duke seems actively opposed to belief. He goes so far as to blame the failure of 1960s utopianism on “the desperate assumption that somebody—or at least some force—is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel.” The only credo in Fear and Loathing is freedom in its most reductive and alienated sense, “a gross, physical salute to the fantastic possibilities of life in this country.”

  Hunter gives us a harrowing portrayal of the human condition as absurd. This is anomie writ wide and deep. Compared to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Albert Camus’s L’Étranger is a lame jailhouse whine, and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is a puppet-theater skit about idleness and boredom. Thompson alone captures the—how else to put it?—fear and loathing that are at the root of the contemporary essence.

  And he makes us laugh at it. This is something we’re unlikely to do during Waiting for Godot performances, even if we’re as high as Raoul Duke. Hunter takes the darkest questions of ontology, the grimmest epistemological queries, and just by posing them sends us doubled over in fits of risibility, our sides aching from armpit to pelvic girdle, the tops of our legs raw from knee-slapping, and beer spitting out of our noses.

  Hunter performs this philosophical legerdemain by creating a pair of empty clowns who seem to have the brains of marmosets but who speak with the mout
hs of poets. They are utterly insensitive, lawless creatures who are nonetheless agonized by the dilemmas of being and nothingness. It’s as if two of the Three Stooges had discovered Søren Kierkegaard and William Butler Yeats.

  Then Thompson fills his clowns with drugs. Drugs let us see things differently. Drugs give us new viewpoints. Drugs provide us with alternative perceptions, thousands of alternative perceptions, all of them wrong. Thus we see the futility of relying on the mind when facing the abyss. Contort the mind however we will, it cannot do the job. What’s more, drugs are all about the self. Thus we see the futility of ego. Drugs are potent agents of change, but they only change me. They have no effect on the outside world. So there everything is, just the way it’s always been, and I’m all changed—like somebody who shows up at a wedding dressed for an orgy. And Thompson fills his clowns with drugs so they can be clowns while also, presumably, being normal (well, more or less normal) men. If you want a truly frightening idea, consider Raoul Duke and the three-hundred-pound Samoan attorney doing all the things they do in Fear and Loathing sober.

  Hunter Thompson takes two fools, incapacitates them, sends them on a farcical quest after a material manifestation of something—the American Dream—that has an immaterial existence, and sends them to look in the wrong place besides. After two-hundred-odd pages of perfect and lyrical writing about that “nothing much,” which twentieth-century hipsters insisted on thinking was the central fact of reality, the fools are back where they started.